Now that you know what your KPIs are for load testing your APIs, it’s time to take a step back to look at the big picture of the results of your load testing. Doing so will ensure that you are able to act on them and aren’t just another crash test dummy, but instead are prepared for whatever load comes your way.
Interpreting Load Testing Results
You have performed your first load tests and you have a lot of data returned. That data needs to be analyzed in order to become useful information. If you are using an API load testing tool like ReadyAPI, you will be able to generate a lot of this information programmatically and automatically. However, you need to work then to integrate those graphs in with more meaningful, actionable information.
With so much of testing automated by the right tools, this interpretation and explanation is where performance testers earn their pay.
Presenting Your Results
So you, mighty tester, have created a hypothesis, drawn tentative conclusions, and repeated the process to verify them. Now it’s time to share it all with your team. Load testing isn’t the most riveting conference room topic. You not only need to gather your performance testing results and understand them, but often you need to be able to present them to people who are perhaps less technical than yourself. If nothing else, you will have to present them to your project manager that will need persuasion as to why he or she needs to allocate resources — time and money — toward fixing these issues, increasing load capacity and decreasing latency.
Tips For Effectively Presenting Your Results
- Visualize your data. Spending all our days staring at screens, it’s definitely the images — not the words — that will help people see where spikes in traffic lead to delays in output. Try simple graphs, but be clear in explaining what each access represents.
- Keep It Simple, Stupid. The KISS Rule of journalism applies here. Slide decks are boring. Create a few slides — try to keep it down to four or five — that summarize and visualize the basics.
- Don’t forget the “why” Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle applies here too. Make sure you offer the compelling reasons why you should improve your performance. Make sure to talk about its importance to UX and customer retention.
- It’s all about the money. Have access to impact on revenue data? Lead with that. The cost of customer downtime or API call latency can be super persuasive.
- Don’t forget your SLA. Your service level agreement is your promise and even legal contract with your customers. Are you meeting it? If you aren’t, that’s definitely worth a compelling slide.
- Focus on your action plan. What have you and your team already done to overcome your load unbalance? What do you plan to do? How can you reallocate resources better? How much time will it take? When should you be able to deliver by?
- When all is done, share your story! It’s a great use case for others to mimic about your load testing experience, as well as illustrates your commitment to improving your customer service.
Utilizing the Right Tools Is Key
As you get started with your load testing, SmartBear has the tools you need to ensure that your APIs perform flawlessly under various traffic conditions. ReadyAPI is the industry’s leading API load testing tool that is great for beginners, because it’s scriptless and allows for easy reuse of your functional API tests from ReadyAPI.
ReadyAPI allows you to quickly get started and:
- Save time & resources by building load tests from pre-configured templates in just a few clicks
- Create real-life traffic patterns from servers ‘on premise’ or in the cloud
- Understand server performance by visualizing the effects of load on your servers with real-time monitoring
- Quickly analyze results by collecting advanced performance metrics for your load test runs and benchmarking them against past tests
- Reuse your existing functional test cases from ReadyAPI for increased efficiency