WHITE PAPER

TRENDS IN PERFORMANCE TESTING

AND ENGINEERING – PERFORM OR
PERISH
Hemalatha Murugesan
 One is spoilt for choices in today’s high analytics, user preferences, predictions, etc. technology landscape. The rush to absorb
consumerism and materialistic world Businesses and IT organizations are moving these technologies is also increasing
leaving the end users both highly at rapid pace to roll out their launches leading to high vulnerability on the
excited, vulnerable as well as extremely using the latest cutting edge technology application’s performance. There is a
demanding. The array and diversity of and migration to newer technologies with significant change in the way Performance
choices is not just limited to technology, the sole objective to ensure that they do Testing and Engineering including
gadgets, smartphones, wearable devices, not only retain their existing customers monitoring is being performed which is
sports vehicles, FMCG goods, white goods, but also add to their base and be market- continuously evolving and becoming more
tourism, food choices etc. but is extensible, dominant leader. complex.
penetrating in every single aspect of
As such, every application that is catering With increased digitization and
one’s day to day life. In today’s world, no
to diverse populations 24x7, 365 days a mobilization being the norm, data
business can survive if one’s product/
year must be Available, Scalable for future analytics and testing to scale would play
service/training or any item is taken to
growth, Predictable and Reliable, lest the a major role in application performance
the market without being online – aka
end user lose their tolerance. What was to ensure better customer experience is
Digitization, Mobilization. Stepping two
earlier 8 seconds being the norm for a provided. DevOps and Agile development
decades back, one wonders how business
page to be rendered has now reduced to will “shift left” forcing Performance Testing
was being done and reached various parts
less than 2 seconds or milliseconds and and Engineering teams to make early
of the globe!
almost all launches going the “app” way, assumptions on customer behaviors and
With intense competition and aggression the response time expected is to be in their needs, viable experiences and growth
to extend the market footprint, every milliseconds. spikes to run tests quickly and validate
organization is launching multiple those assumptions. Early predictability
Devops, Agile, SMAC, migration to cloud,
products or services catering to different leveraging analytics on the application
VPN, Big Data, MongoDB, Cassandra,
user groups, age sectors, geo’s based performance will change gears in the way
- phew – the list is endless with newer
launches, customization, personalization we do or approach performance testing
technology, tools being launched by
or rather “mood based” coupled with and engineering.
the day to address to ever expanding

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Performance Driven Development (PDD) and Resiliency, yet no compromise office products like Alteryx, Analytical
i.e. PE focus right from requirements to on quality and security. All this at less Workbenches, etc., clients are looking for
production rollout to post production, TCO! Automation is the key across all standard benchmarks/baselines of these
monitoring are one of the key trends SDLC and widely prevalent in testing products and its impact on PE before
noticed as it helps in early bottleneck types. As such every activity be in NFR rolling out full-blown implementation. With
identifications and tuning of the same. gathering phases, scripting, modeling, test almost all the apps on Mobile channels
With Devops adoption having a close environment setup, releases, configuration to interact with their systems, there is an
handshake between Development management, etc. is getting automated intense need to do PE at every stage, at
and Operations teams to address real which is inclusive of performance testing every component and layer and across all
production volumetric, PDD helps achieve and engineering activities through these stacks. Few impacting trends seen are:
it to a large extent. This in turn demands phases as well. Performance Engineering
Omni-channel retail customer experience
adoption of APM tools and methodologies. framework adapting to the agile/CI CD
– Performance testing and engineering to
methodology for Web-based, Thick Client,
The focus has now shifted for early ensure consistent user experience across
batch job-based apps etc. needs to be
involvement of Performance Engineering various touch points for application rewrite
developed, suited to the ever-changing
in the application lifecycle – Early or new application development projects.
technology landscape.
Validation of PE proactively and not
Technology and infrastructure
leaving it to be addressed prior to roll out Financial institutions have been one of
rationalization – Mostly driven by cost
which was a reactive approach followed the front runners in IT adoption where
optimization and compliance requirements
earlier. Due to this, the industry is seeing they would need to meet the regulatory
PT&E done to ensure zero disruption in
increasing launches of tools/processes compliances inclusive of performance.
service and user experience in data center
supporting proactive PE approach. With multiple banking packages/products
migration/consolidation, technology stack
to choose from trading platforms and
Businesses are demanding launches upgrade or movement from on-premise to
investment management products
at faster pace with high Availability cloud.
like Appian Way, middle and back-

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Bulk customer data handling-Retail and infrastructure that minimizes TCO. PT or layered performance testing and
institutional customers are given more Performance simulation and Engineering engineering also are gaining prevalence
control to deal with their data. As a result of of Day in the Life, for e.g., in a line of as there will be so many components
which interfaces such as dashboard, search, business through end-to-end PT of and interfaces in financial products and
profiles, and homepages are becoming disparate systems analyzed. An example Production Monitoring, Capacity Prediction
more interactive and data-heavy. PT&E is work-flow of a Mortgage loan, Mutual Modeling based on that.
ensuring the performance SLAs are within Fund, Credit rating process etc. is assessed
Another trend we are seeing in Retail
acceptable limits in all user interactions. for performance simulation.
space is that applications built using
Tackle Integration Challenges – PT&E has While the request has always been to have Microservice, Docker Container etc. which
been carried out to deal with scalability the exact production environment with requires tweaking monitoring and analysis
and performance issues arising due to right volume for Performance testing but approach. An interesting emerging trend
enterprise, partner integration, middleware the move is to Test Right with the Next is Hybrid datacenter approach i.e. part of
upgrades, etc. Best which has predictable performance the system is hosted in Cloud and while
on the production environment replayed. part of it is hosted in a Permanent data
With intense pressure to reduce cost,
Hardware Capacity planning and seamless center. This would require expanding the
banks are looking at embracing Clouds,
integration to PT/PE framework especially list of performance KPI to cover all aspects
DC consolidation and solutions around
for new Automated Infrastructure of both the DCs.In some cases, we are also
it. Consolidation of their LOB’s, tools by
spawning through CHEF/RECIPE, seeing hybrid datacenter approach e.g.
encouraging COE/NFT factory is setup
automated platform build-outs and other part of system in Cloud and part of it in on
to reduce cost. Banks are also moving to
large Infragistics-related programs owing permanent data center. Again we need to
deploying software’s like SAP, PEGA, and
to Merger & Acquisition, Data Center expand list of performance KPI to cover all
Siebel etc. due to their low maintenance
migration etc. aspects of two DCs.
cost and better predictable quality
compared to home-grown solutions. DB virtualization for PT&E also seems to An upcoming hot trend seen is front-end
be another emerging trend, though not Performance testing and engineering due
Besides, PE for apps hosted in Cloud and
implemented on a large scale today as to RIA/Web 2.0 popularity and to provide
Virtualized environments is also picking
compared to service virtualization. Service same personalized user experience across
up due to the on-demand resource
virtualization and Agile or component various media.
provisioning and sharable hardware

Conclusion
For any organization to survive in today’s With changing and demanding trends, it cloud testing, test data management,
competitive world, it is important that is important that Performance testing and Infrastructure testing, virtualization, TEMS
the products/applications are Scalable, Engineering are considered at all layers and and other upcoming specialized services,
Predictable, and Available exciting the components as well for successive use of etc., at Infosys. Hemalatha has been
user, thereby ensuring loyalty as well the products launched. instrumental in developing the Enterprise
as converting to business. However Performance Testing Solutions which
Hemalatha Murugesan is currently heading
rich the application features are, when offers performance testing solutions &
the Performance Testing and Engineering
functionally tested, if the application is services and has also setup the state-of-art
in IVS at Infosys. She has been involved
not responding to the expectations of the performance testing lab, both at Infosys.
in setting up, pioneering, incubation and
user, it is but natural to lose the customer.
evolving emerging testing services like

For more information, contact askus@infosys.com

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