Load Test Mobile Applications
No business can ignore performance and reliability of their critical or client facing applications. If response times are below expectations customers will stop using those disappointing apps and spend their money on other, more reliable systems. Performance of your mobile applications is critical because there are billions of applications in the app stores and customers can easily switch to a faster, more efficient choice. Those frustrated customers will remember your brand as clumsy and most likely never return. Organizations need to realize that they put their business at risk by ignoring performance during their DEV, QA and Ops stages. Load Testing of mobile devices is not too complicated if you use a modern toolset. In this post I will outline how to setup and execute a load test of web based mobile applications with LoadView.
# Load Test Preparation
Start your load test of mobile applications preparation with a review of performance or non-functional requirements and extract response time expectations, number of users working with your app and number of requests they will execute. If those are not specified, contact your business analysts or architects to get the relevant figures. Once you have those details, start with calculation of how many concurrent mobile users will work with your app. Performance engineers use Little’s Law with the following formula:
Make sure that you simulate actual and future growth load patterns. The usage of your application will grow and it’s important that you also check response times on the upper usage borders. As a final preparation step you should create a test specification, outline critical elements such as a description of your test environment, scheduled test runs, the load pattern, the performance requirements and responsibilities.
# Implementation and Test Configuration
Use our capture and replay tool, EveryStep to capture manual clicks on your mobile app of choice. Select mobile devices such as iPhone, Android, Nokia or many more before you start with recording of your script. After you have clicked on “Start Recording” EveryStep will emulate the correct device and let you navigate manually through your application while it captures all actions. Once you’ve completed your navigation steps you simply save the recorded activities and execute a first trial run of the captured user actions on your local machine. In some cases, a load test needs to simulate how an application behaves if a broad range of input data is used. EveryStep makes this parametrization extremely easy because you can select the scripted input data, change the type to a parameter and after you’ve uploaded the automated script you can assign the file which contains all input data. As a final step, click on save to upload it into our LoadView platform.
After you’ve created the script and uploaded it to our SaaS based load testing environment, LoadView will guide you through the configuration of this test run. You specify the test execution plan which includes the number of concurrent users and the test duration. As a final step you will select from what region you would like to inject the load on your app. This allows you a realistic measurement of response times as they will be perceived from your real user community.
# Mobile Load Test Execution and Reporting
LoadView makes test execution very easy. It deploys all testing scripts to our global load injection machines, simulates the mobile user actions according to the test execution plan, collects test results and provides real time insights about actual response times during test execution. Once your test run has finished you will receive a detailed test report in your inbox. Furthermore, you can browse through all identified hotspots or with a single click you can share those details with your dev teams.
# How to Proceed From There
After you’ve eliminated all hotspots, sized the hardware accordingly and ensured that performance of your apps is within agreed boundaries you can reuse implemented scripts for performance monitoring on production. This script mobility is unique with LoadView since it reduces your costs, enables continuous performance improvement on production and helps you to identify outages during production before it affects your end users.
# Top 8 Steps for Mastering Load Testing of Mobile Applications with LoadView:
- Collect Performance Requirements
- Automate your Mobile User Actions
- Model Your Test Execution Plan
- Assign Global Load Injection Machines
- Start Test Execution
- Receive Test Results and Identify Hotspots
- Repeat Test Once Issues Have Been Solved
- Reuse Mobile Load Testing Scripts for Uptime and Performance Monitoring During Production
LoadView’s mobile device load testing approach is simple and powerful. Accurate user action simulation on your mobile devices, support for all major devices such as Android, Nokia and iPhone are essential factors to make your performance validation a success.
