About the necessity of Performance Testing for Internet banking projects

The article I wrote previously is also about the bank testing, "talking about the necessity of Performance Testing for Internet banking projects".

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Over the past decade, network technology has seen a new and changing landscape, and People's Network life has become richer and richer, especially the popularity of Social Network Services (SNS) in the last two years. At the same time, the consumer's demand for concurrency through network services is becoming more and more obvious, and software performance testing is becoming more and more important.

The application system is like a person. Functional testing is like a person's left leg. The development and design are in the middle, like the core of the brain; performance testing is the right leg of a human being. When a person walks, he must have two legs, one step on his left leg, and one step on his right leg can go straight forward. If he lacks one, he will make his foot and even have a wheelchair. Software testing is the final "Door" for Software Quality Assurance and a powerful referee that is indispensable throughout the software development process. As a test engineer, I have also used a stupid method in my performance testing experience to test the performance of a function module of the application system: holding a stopwatch on the left hand to count the time, the right hand controls the mouse trigger action. Now it's really funny. In recent years, performance testing has crossed the current stage and is moving towards automation and intelligence. The importance of performance testing is even more important in the banking industry, as banking systems (mainly including core and peripheral systems) network environment, database environment, application server environment, system platform, technical architecture, and other complexity and diversity, unpredictable user load and increasingly complex applications make the software performance very difficult to control.

The following are two bank cases to illustrate the necessity of performance testing:

At the beginning of June 2011, a network error occurred shortly after the online banking system of XX Bank went live. The project team owner promptly applies to the company's headquarters for relevant technical personnel, including performance testing experts, quickly builds a performance testing environment, tests the performance of the entire online banking system, and recreates logon exceptions, senior developers conduct one-to-one code troubleshooting. Performance tests show that the primary cause of the problem lies in the password control of a third-party company. The password control uses a global variable in the Code. As a result, exceptions may occur during system concurrency. Other users in the system cannot properly parse the password during access, causing logon failure. After the launch, these problems, although the problem lies in the password control of a third-party company, have also caused some losses to the company, project team, and customers, especially damaging the company's image, this shows that our work before going online is not enough. In fact, these problems can be completely avoided through formal performance tests before going online. Why don't you think about them?

Most people think that performance testing is a simple task. "Isn't it just a tool?" Is this definitely a misunderstanding. An application system that has not performed any performance tests is not responsible for its performance. It carries great risks and is not perfect. In a complex and diverse environment such as a bank, even good software development engineers cannot ensure that the developed software has no performance problems. Although improving system performance is not accomplished by performance testing alone, performance testing is still an effective way to control performance.

Therefore, software testing is important, and performance testing is a top priority and cannot be ignored.