In performance testing, we are focusing to find the bottleneck of an application, but in performance engineering, the focus is to reduce those bottlenecks and improve the performance of that application.

Do you think choosing the right metrics is important for performance testing efficiency?

Any testing process is meaningless without a goal, metrics can often act as the goal when it comes to performance testing. When it comes to performance testing goals the focus should be on metrics like throughput, response time, Latency, Error percentage, etc.
By performing the performance testing, based on these metrics, we can assure the performance of a web application or an API, or any system.
if a tester is not able to identify the right metrics in the early stage itself, it will be hard to reach any consultation and to put an end to the testing process.

What according to you is the biggest performance testing hurdle at present and in the near future

Definitely, the environment setup process,  less information about the expected requirement and the hardest one, not having a clear picture regarding the goal of the performance testing.

Cloud computing is becoming prominent in software testing. What are the things that need to be taken care of while performing tests in a cloud platform?

1. The environment setup
2. The cloud environment knowledge of that QA engineer, who is responsible for the testing process
3. Knowledge about the working principle of cloud architecture
4. Failure due to one user action on the cloud should not affect other users’ performance
5. The data integrity while performing data-driven testing.

The shift from performance testing to performance engineering. What’s your take on this?

In performance testing, the focus will be on finding the bottleneck of an application, but in performance engineering, the focus is to reduce those bottlenecks and to improve the performance of the application. So, as a QA engineer,  finding the bottleneck or any performance-related issue is not enough nowadays, we must learn or think about how should we overcome those issues.
Moreover we, the QA engineers are responsible for the quality of the application that will reach the end-user.

Why stress testing is important in the current scenario?

In the real-time scenario, we’ll not be able to assume the user traffic of an application, it may increase, decrease or remain constant over a certain period of time
To generate that kind of real-time scenario we must perform spike or stress testing to ensure that the application has what it takes to deal with the sudden change in the traffic volume.