System availability, reliability, and scalability are critical concerns for every payment industry participant. An effective performance testing strategy helps ensure that your payment systems always operate at peak efficiency.
This guide explores the essentials of performance testing, highlighting its importance for the payments industry, as well as some best practices to help your organization deliver superior customer service 24x7x365.
In the fast-paced world of consumer payments, ensuring optimal system performance is an essential requirement of any well-designed payment testing environment.
To meet the demands of ever more sophisticated consumers, the payments industry has grown increasingly complex, elevating the risk of outages and downtime, which can cost millions of dollars and cause significant brand damage.
Regular and rigorous performance testing helps ensure that your payment systems can handle changes in transaction volumes, including rapid spikes and peak workloads, with no negative impacts to the consumer payment experience.
This guide will review several fundamentals of performance testing and outline various strategies your organization can implement to optimize your payment systems for peak performance.
Helps ensure that an application performs correctly under anticipated user loads. The goal is to identify & correct performance issues before the software is put into production.
Applies very heavy workloads to an application or system to see how it handles the high volume. The test may be run until the system fails in order to determine its breaking point.
Similar to a stress test, a spike test is used to analyze and evaluate how an application or system responds to a rapid (abnormal) surge or spike in volume from one or more sources.
Scalability tests are used to analyze how an application or system scales while various processing parameters or resources, such as CPU or memory, are manipulated.
Endurance testing is commonly used to validate that a specific component or an entire system can effectively handle an expected workload over an extended period of time.
Performance testing is a type of non-functional testing that evaluates the speed, responsiveness, and stability of systems, applications, and networks under various transaction processing scenarios.
When done correctly, effective performance testing helps determine how systems perform under different workloads, identifies bottlenecks (real or potential), and demonstrates the system's ability to meet (or not meet) specific performance-related benchmarks.
A robust performance testing strategy helps ensure that your products and services work perfectly on every transaction, enabling your organization to consistently deliver a superior payment experience that enhances customer satisfaction and drives revenue growth.
“When outages do occur, they are becoming more expensive, a trend that is likely to continue as dependency on digital services increases. With more than two-thirds of all outages costing more than $100,000, the business case for investing more in resiliency - and training - is becoming stronger.”
The payments industry operates in a 24x7 high-stakes environment where speed and reliability are of paramount importance. Performance testing is therefore critically important for several reasons:
Performance testing ensures that payment systems can handle expected and unexpected workloads, minimizing the risk of downtime and transaction failures. Reliable systems build trust with customers and partners.
Performance testing helps ensure you can deliver a superior payment experience to increasingly sophisticated and demanding consumers on every transaction.
Card brands and payment networks often mandate performance testing to verify that mission-critical systems can accurately and securely process expected transaction volumes without degrading network performance.
Frequent system outages and slow processing times can lead to lost business, even fines and penalties. Performance testing helps identify and mitigate these risks before they can negatively impact your business.
Consistent system performance and reliability will delight your customers, enhance your brand’s reputation, expand your market share, and drive additional revenue.
Continuous performance testing involves integrating performance testing into your organization’s development lifecycle, allowing for continuous monitoring and testing of your system's performance.
This approach ensures that performance issues are detected and resolved early, reducing the risk of performance degradation in production.
The benefits of continuous performance testing include:
By integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines, potential performance issues can be identified and addressed during development rather than post-deployment.
Identifying and fixing performance issues early in the development cycle is typically less costly than addressing them after deployment.
Continuous performance testing fosters better collaboration between development, QA, and operations teams, leading to more robust and reliable systems.
Continuous performance testing supports agile methodologies, enabling faster iterations and more responsive development processes.
While specific performance testing mechanics are going to vary from business to business, there is a generic framework that can be followed to identify the performance characteristics of your applications and systems and help optimize their performance.
Define the performance benchmarks and criteria based on your unique business requirements. This includes transaction volumes, throughput requirements, resource utilization, and response times.
Develop test scenarios that simulate real-world processing patterns and workloads. This should include a mix of transaction types, authorization parameters, network connections, etc.
Choose appropriate performance testing tools - such as Paragon’s Web FASTest Platform - that match your requirements and integrate into your broader payment testing environment.
Run the tests regularly using the transaction scenarios you have created. You should also include simulated failure situations with your testing, such as the loss of a network connection, to ensure that your systems respond correctly.
Analyze the test results to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. You should track both events and trends to continually monitor, manage, and improve overall system performance.
Implement necessary modifications as soon as possible and retest to ensure the changes are effective. Continually fine-tuning the system optimizes performance and helps prevent major outages.
Automation can further enhance your testing capabilities, enabling performance runs to be scheduled to execute at night or on weekends or even be integrated with a CI/CD pipeline process.
Analysis by automation consultancy firm Test Monitor reveals that test automation improves testing process times by 40–70%, while Capgemini research indicates it reduces testing time by 60% and cuts costs by up to 30%.
Automated tests can be executed faster and more frequently, providing quicker feedback on system performance. This is particularly useful in agile and continuous delivery environments.
Automation reduces the risk of human error, ensuring that tests are always run accurately and consistently. Repeatable tests produce reliable data, making it easier to track performance over time.
Automated tests can easily scale to handle new test scenarios or model transaction growth, enabling organizations to make more informed business decisions.
Automation helps free up valuable human resources from repetitive testing tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities.
Choose tools that integrate well with your existing development environment and testing infrastructure.
Regularly update and maintain test scripts so they accurately reflect any changes in your business operations, applications, or systems.
Integrating automated performance tests into your CI/CD pipeline processes can further accelerate and optimize your testing operations.
Integrating performance testing with other payment testing processes, such as functional and regression testing, provides a more holistic view of overall system performance and helps ensure that all aspects of the system are tested comprehensively.
“Test early, test often”, is a popular industry adage that also rings true for performance testing. Testing early and often provides the best opportunity to find and address performance issues before they impact your mission-critical systems.
Schedule time with a Paragon consultant to review your current performance testing processes and procedures, as well as any challenges that you may be facing. We can then explore ways that Paragon can help address your issues and improve productivity, increase accuracy, and expand test coverage.
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