Learning the Fundamentals of Performance Testing

25-minute Talk

Beginner session

Timetable

11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

Thursday 24th

Room

Room F2 - Track 2: Talks

Audience

Anyone who wants to learn about performance testing.

Key-Learning

- Understand the difference between client side and server side performance testing

- Know the different metrics when it comes to performance testing

- Learn how to run client side performance test and analyse results from a Google Lighthouse report

- Learn how tools such as k6 can help with different types of performance testing such as load testing, stress testing and soak testing

Understand what and why we do performance testing and add it into your testing toolkit.

People have no patience for slow websites. As testers, we need to check that the performance and overall user experience is not impacted or even better, that it has been improved.

It's been proven that our attention span has decreased over time. Online, if a page loads slowly, people are quick to go to a competitor’s site. They have no patience for slow websites.

Businesses that fail to realise this can lose a lot of money after racking up negative reviews from customers. As testers, we need to make sure that our users’ experience is positive. It’s not enough to test that requirements function as intended. We need to ensure that performance and user experience are not affected. And we cannot leave any of this for a later stage.

As part of this talk, I will cover the following things:

- Why do we need to test for performance and what is performance testing?

- The difference between client side and server side performance testing.

- The difference between load testing, stress testing and soak testing

- An overview of what metrics to consider when doing client side performance testing.

- An overview of what metrics to consider when doing server side performance testing.

- A quick glimpse on how to measure the performance of your favourite website using Google Lighthouse for client side performance and k6 for server side performance.

After this talk, you should be equipped with the knowledge and tools to use to get started with performance testing.