I think this is one of the questions that you may hear or you may want an answer for it. How often we should do it , what should be tested and how we decide if it is good or bad performance?

I can’t say that I have an absolute answer for all of this questions but I think I have an answer.

Let’s start with “How often you should run a performance testing”

Before we ask how often , let’s ask first why?

You plan , design and execute a performance testing run for one the following reasons in my opinion :

– Set a performance baseline for a running system.
– Compare performance between old system (legacy system) and new system.
– Detect performance enhancements / degradations between different versions of a software or hot-fixes (patches)

Because we ask how often it means that we already executed a performance testing before and may have a performance testing set to execute when it is needed.

Here is how often you should run a performance testing , in my opinion off course 🙂

• If you introduce , modify or enhance a code / new code , which may affect the current running software.
• If you modify the current environment infrastructure and also if you modify configuration(S) which may affect the system performance.
• To simulate a load happened in production to identify the cause of production Incident related to performance (performance issues).
• Before every peak season , mostly for e-commerce websites like “Black Friday” to make sure that everything should working as expected.

What do you think , if you have other ideas or real life scenarios you can leave it in the comment section.