From the course: Performance Testing Foundations

What is performance testing?

From the course: Performance Testing Foundations

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What is performance testing?

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- [Instructor] What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term performance testing? There might be one particular kind of testing that springs to mind for you. But the reality is, the term performance testing can refer to a number of different kinds of tests that we can run. Since the term is so broad, it can be difficult to accurately define, but I think in this case, the Wikipedia definition of this term is actually a pretty good place to start. Performance testing is in general, a testing practice performed to determine how a system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. Now of course this is a very broad definition. So let's dive into it a bit so that we can get a better understanding of it. What is meant by responsiveness and stability? Well, responsiveness usually has to do with speed. It has to do with how quickly the application responds when it's asked to do something. Stability, on the other hand, has to do with how consistent or reliable the application is. For example, does it continue to work properly if there are many concurrent users? With stability, we're looking at things like ensuring that the server doesn't crash or that it doesn't miss out on processing some requests or tying them out and things of that sort. Another interesting word in our definition is the word workload. Responsiveness and stability are the results that we're checking during a performance test. They let us know if the test has passed or failed. The workload is the other side of that. It's the input to the test, the way that we load or stress the systems so that we can see how well it responds and how stable it is. As we go through this course, you'll learn about both sides of this coin. We'll look at some of the kinds of workloads that you can use in performance testing, things like load testing, stress testing, endurance testing, spike testing, and scalability testing. will also look at the other side of things and see how to actually discover and measure responsiveness and stability and how to know if the values that we see are okay or not. There's going to be a lot to learn in this course. So let's keep going.

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