VS Team System Performance and Load Testing - What is all the other terminology in comparison?

Surfing the internet can be mind boggling when searching industry terminology. Try searching terminology for testing that a solution is able to handle its data obligations while conducting itself in a suitable fashion. How do you like those words?

 

Terminology I found and have experienced:

 

Stress Testing

Load Testing

Performance Testing

Volume Testing

Concurrency Testing

Endurance Testing

Scalability Testing

Soak Testing

 

What does all this mean and why has Microsoft in Team System only used two of these?

 

I believe Microsoft in Team System has done the right thing. How many terms do we need to identify testing a solution can handle real life usage with peak times and large amounts of data?

 

VS Team System Performance testing is designed for developers to measure, evaluate, and target performance issues in their code. Profiling is used in performance testing; it is the process of observing and recording metrics about the behavior of solution code. Issues normally stem from code that performs slowly, or uses too much system memory.

 

Load testing is used to simulate many users accessing a server at the same time. In load testing, the web tests simulate multiple users opening simultaneous connections to a server and making multiple HTTP requests. Unit tests added to a load test can be used to test data access.

 

With all the features of the Load tool you are definitely stressing the solution, adding volume, testing concurrency, endurance, scalability and soak so why all these terms. With a combined performance test of developer code and load testing of the solution, we are testing the “Performance” of the solution in my opinion. Let’s keep it to the two terms so everyone understands what’s being tested and why.

 

Quote for today.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. (Hans Hofmann)

 

Have a great weekend … Testa J