Objective of Scalability Testing
The objective of scalability testing is:
- To determine how the application scales with increasing workload.
- To determine the user limit for the software product.
- To determine client-side degradation and end user experience under load.
- To assess the system’s performance under various network circumstances, such as latency and bandwidth fluctuations, in order to guarantee dependable operation in a range of settings.
- To determine whether the system is capable of withstanding scenarios of high usage, making sure that unexpected spikes in traffic can be accommodated without causing performance issues.
- To guarantee that the system’s scalability prevents performance decline and maintains acceptable response times, both of which improve user experience.
- To determine server-side robustness and degradation.
- To help developers improve the system design or code by pointing out locations that could become bottlenecks when the load grows.
- To evaluate the effective use of system resources, including CPU, memory and network bandwidth, in relation to the system’s increasing load, in order to guarantee resource management.
- To make that the system satisfies performance criteria and offers a satisfying user experience, assess the system’s response time under various loads.
Scalability Testing – Software Testing
Scalability Testing is a type of non-functional testing in which the performance of a software application, system, network or process is tested in terms of its capability to scale up or scale down the number of user request load or other such performance attributes. It can be carried out at a hardware, software or database level. Scalability Testing is defined as the ability of a network, system, application, product or a process to perform the function correctly when changes are made in the size or volume of the system to meet a growing need. It ensures that a software product can manage the scheduled increase in user traffic, data volume, transaction counts frequency and many other things. It tests the system, processes or database’s ability to meet a growing need.
Scalability Testing is to measure at what point the software product or the system stops scaling and identify the reason behind it. The parameters used for this testing differs from one application to another. For example, scalability testing of a web page depends on the number of users, CPU usage, network usage while scalability testing of a web server depends on the number of requests processed.