Happy Birthday Wikipedia!
As a child, my mother made an investment in a set of World Book Encyclopedias for my education. Those books came in handy so many times – especially on the night before a paper was due. If the subject was worth a teacher assigning homework about it, then it was in the encyclopedia.
Well, today I would like to recognize the 9th birthday of Wikipedia. With a tag line of “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, it is one of the most useful and used web content tools on the planet.
I thought it would be fun to see how Wikipedia defines some of the key terms we deal with in web application development and performance testing definitions.
- Load testing is the process of putting demand on a system or device and measuring its response. There is little agreement on what the specific goals of load testing are. The term is often used synonymously with software performance testing, reliability testing, and volume testing.
- Performance Testing in the computer industry is used to determine the speed or effectiveness of a computer, network, software program or device. This process can involve quantitative tests done in a lab, such as measuring the response time or the number of MIPS (millions of instructions per second) at which a system functions. Qualitative attributes such as reliability, scalability and interoperability may also be evaluated. Performance testing is often done in conjunction with stress testing.
- Web testing is the name given to software testing that focuses on web applications, and is one of the fastest growing areas of software testing. Complete web testing of a system before going live is the primary step to get assured of an entire web application’s ability to work properly. It can help address such issues like readiness of your web server for the traffic you are expecting and for the increasing number of users (Load testing), the ability to survive a massive spike in user traffic, your server hardware sufficiency and so on.
- Stress testing refers to tests that put a greater emphasis on robustness, availability, and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behavior under normal circumstances. In particular, the goals of such tests may be to ensure the software doesn’t crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources (such as memory or disk space), unusually high concurrency, or denial of service attacks.
- Endurance testing is usually done to determine if the application can sustain the continuous expected load. During endurance tests, memory utilization is monitored to detect potential leaks. Also important, but often overlooked is performance degradation. That is, to ensure that the throughput and/or response times after some long period of sustained activity are as good or better than at the beginning of the test.
- Soak testing involves testing a system with a significant load extended over a significant period of time, to discover how the system behaves under sustained use. For example, in software testing, a system may behave exactly as expected when tested for 1 hour. However, when it is tested for 3 hours, problems such as memory leaks cause the system to fail or behave randomly.
- Spike testing is done by spiking the number of users and understanding the behavior of the application whether it will go down or will it be able to handle dramatic changes in load.
- Configuration testing is another variation on traditional performance testing. Rather than testing for performance from the perspective of load you are testing the effects of configuration changes in the application landscape on application performance and behaviour. A common example would be experimenting with different methods of load-balancing.
- Isolation testing is a term used to describe repeating a test execution that resulted in an application problem. Often used to isolate and confirm the fault domain.
- Reliability testing often consists of conducting a test on an item (under specified load and conditions) to determine the time it takes for a failure to occur. Forcing failures also allows analysis of the mode of failure for possible corrective actions.