When developing and growing your testing strategy, one of the key questions a team should be asking themselves is this: How do I scale this?
Scalability is hugely important for any testing team that is yearning to expand their capabilities, widen their test coverage, and kick their testing up a notch. But it is not as easy as simply getting bigger and bolder with your tests. The availability of time, money, and other resources like team member head count and skill level all play a role in scalability.
So, how can you ensure smooth scalability without growing pains?
An important tactic in your journey to scalability is to conduct scalability testing. Scalability testing helps an organization take the steps necessary to establish the best user experience available while also taking into consideration organizational requirements and costs.
In this blog, I will discuss what scalability testing is, the process of scalability testing and its benefits, and what components should be tested during scalability testing.
What Is Scalability Testing?
Scalability testing is a type of load test that measures an app’s ability to scale up or down based on an increase in number of users. It determines how an app is going to perform during sudden spikes or drops in user requests.
Scalability is all about changes to the system, and scalability testing is your best bet on finding out how your app is going to respond to those changes. When scaling testing to address going from thousands of users to hundreds of thousands (or millions!), that unexpected increase can strain the CPU or memory availability.
A great way to account for increases or decreases in users is setting parameters — such as a certain number of users changing per second — to correlate and identify exactly where the system failed in its attempt to scale up or down.
How I Got Started With Scalability Testing
You can take your approach to scalability testing in many directions in terms of complexity. But, basically, my start-to-finish scalability test looked like this:
Identify what you believe to be the potential capability of the system — both currently and in the future.
Develop test scenarios or use cases that will push the system to meet new requirements.
Now you execute those tests — at consistent, regular intervals if possible.
Let the data speak. Record the results top to bottom to identify any inconsistencies.
Take the data and any insights you may glean from it to the next link in the chain to action.
Repeat regularly.
Your test scripts should mimic a user’s behavior as accurately as possible. Ensure your test data is properly defined and placed where it is supposed to be. After all, your tests are only as good as what you put into them.
How I Benefited From Scalability Testing
Incorporating scalability tests into your testing strategy will go a long way in helping you ramp up the scalability of your testing overall. Doing so, I experienced a few major benefits in your development process.
Lower Cost
As mentioned, scaling up your testing can be expensive. That is why it is imperative to approach it with your available resources in mind. Scalability testing optimized my app and my overall testing infrastructure to ensure I was not spending too much or inadvertently hiding bugs when I scaled my capacity up or down.
Find Fixes Faster
Scalability tests helped immensely with finding and fixing bugs in my test environment faster. The longer you allow bugs to fester (pun intended) in your testing environment, the more expensive it becomes to address them later down the road.
Improved UX
Testing my app under a heavy load — like simulating peak traffic events such as Black Friday — let me know where the holes are in my user experience. It allowed me to check for responsivity and app performance. Then I leveraged the information gleaned from scalability tests to improve key metrics like response time for an overall better customer experience.
Happy Customers
This is the result we are all striving towards after all, is it not? A poor user experience is the fastest way to lose a customer. As the adage goes, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to build trust and very little to lose it. Scalability testing ensured my app could handle whatever was thrown at it — resulting in happy customers and fortified brand reputation.
4 Components To Keep in Mind When Scalability Testing
You can put pretty much any component of your app through scalability testing. But there are a few that you should consider prioritizing.
Network Usage
A network requires a lot of love and attention. It is a vastly complicated component of your app. By putting my network usage through scalability testing, I can improve upon and establish smooth downscaling and upscaling.
My app will work best when network usage is at its lowest. It is important to test it under a wide range of network usage conditions such as 3G/4G/5G, broadband/narrowband, various WiFi frequencies, when the app (the device) is on the move or in a static location, and more.
User-Related Performance
This is a big one for testing the performance of your app. When the number of users of my app increases, will my app slow down and break? Does my system freeze? With scalability testing, I can find out how quickly my app slows down or stops working entirely, thus applying that information in order to ensure a smooth performance. Create tests that run against a small number of users and a large number of users and any amount in between.
Throughput
This metric tells me what my app does in the face of a number of user requests within a specified timeframe. When I scale down or scale up the system load drastically in a period of one minute, the goal is for my server response time to remain stable. If it does not, investigate why that is so and address it.
Response Time
Response time is the metric that affects users the most. Every component leading up to how a user interacts with my app could be perfect, but if — for whatever reason — a user is waiting for upwards of a minute or two, that spells doom for my app. Scalability testing against response time will determine how long it takes for user requests to be processed during a period of heavy load on my system. I used what I learned here to optimize my system speed.
Bottom Line
For your app to grow and thrive, you need to strongly consider its capability for scaling. It is imperative if you want to improve the quality and performance of your app.
Scaling your app can be complex, but it does not have to be if you partner with the right testing platform. BlazeMeter offers unrivaled scalability of up to two million users(!), which allows teams to get the absolute most out of their app. By leveraging the industry’s most-trusted performance tester for your scalability testing, your app will truly be capable of handling whatever it is put through.
What are you waiting for? You can start testing with BlazeMeter for FREE today!