Performance testing is too often an afterthought despite the need for application stability, speed, scalability and responsiveness, ensuring new-release software can handle a given workload, Micro Focus suggests.
Customers may need to carry out performance testing for different reasons, whether to discover whether the system can handle thousands of users, or to locate potential bottlenecks within an application. It can also help teams ascertain whether the software can perform as the vendor promised, or compare different solutions.
“Identify the production environment, testing environment, and testing tools at your disposal. Document the hardware, software, infrastructure specifications, and configurations in both test and production environments to ensure coherence,” says Micro Focus.
“Some performance testing may occur in the production environment but there must be rigorous safeguards that prevent the testing from disrupting production operations.”
Afterwards, consolidate and analyse the test results and communicate these to relevant stakeholders. Then it’s time to fine-tune the application and resolve any shortcomings or issues before retesting. Engineering the performance by testing and tuning the software is crucial – which means that automated testing tools like Micro Focus’ LoadRunner can play an important role.
Micro Focus has just announced artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements to its UFT testing tools. The UFT family is a unified set of solutions aimed at simplifying automation across functional testing processes, enabling teams to scale up their application delivery.
Raffi Margaliot, Micro Focus senior vice president of application delivery management, said enterprises increasingly need new applications delivered faster and more often across many different operating environments.
“So over the past two years we’ve steadily infused our existing products with AI features. Last June we debuted new AI-based capabilities to help organisations overcome the challenges of mobile testing and this announcement extends the same support to web-based testing,” Margaliot said. “More importantly this customer-centric innovation is available to our extensive customer base with intelligent tools to accelerate adoption of AI within their existing testing assets.”
Micro Focus AI-powered test automation in the UFT family means users only need to compose a single script that will automatically run on multiple platforms and browsers. This reduces the overall time spent on creating and maintaining test assets while increasing test coverage. Crowdsourced feedback from customers will be used to adapt and evolve the AI framework over time.
Forrester in June named Micro Focus a strong performer in continuous functional test automation for Q2 2020.
Read the full Micro Focus announcement around the UFT family.
