UI Performance Testing Tools & Best Practices

In order to ensure that the UI—or user interface—performs at its most optimal, it is important to use UI performance testing. UIs that are insufficiently tested can have issues that impact user experience and reduce overall customer satisfaction, thereby decreasing revenue. To ensure the best results and keep issues from arising, UI testing should be comprehensive, reliable, and efficient.

What Is UI Performance Testing?

UI performance testing is a type of testing in the software lifecycle that measures the stability, speed, responsiveness, and scalability of a particular software application’s UI. Typically, it measures how fast the UI responds to different user interactions and how satisfactory its performance is under various load conditions. This type of testing is traditionally conducted by developers as well as quality assurance engineers.

What Is UI Load Testing?

UI load testing is a subcategory of UI performance testing that focuses on evaluating a software’s ability to handle different user load conditions. To conduct the test, the tester simulates heavy user traffic on an application’s user interface in order to determine how well it performs under peak usage conditions. Similar types of testing including stress tests, endurance tests, and spike tests.

UI vs. GUI Testing: What’s the Difference?

UI stands for user interface while GUI stands for graphical user interface. The terms can often be used interchangeably, but they do refer to different concepts.

UI, in particular, is a term used to refer to the entire interface of a software application. This includes graphical elements as well as non-graphical ones.

Meanwhile, GUI is a term used specifically to describe the graphical elements of an interface. This can include things like buttons, menus, and icons, as well as others. While UI performance testing can include components of GUI testing, it also includes non-graphical components such as accessibility, flow, and layout.

UI Performance Testing Tools

There are many tools that can be used to conduct UI performance testing. Ranorex Studio is the perfect solution for all your UI performance testing needs. It serves as an all-in-one testing solution with a wide range of capabilities including (but not limited to) UI testing, load testing, and performance testing. With features such as object recognition, data-driven testing, and codeless test automation, Ranorex Studio makes efficient and comprehensive testing convenient and reliable.

How to Test UI Performance

Testing effectively requires a few simple steps. These steps are critical to ensuring a successful process.

Determine Objectives

In this stage, developers determine the objectives for testing. In order to complete this step, developers must define what they want to achieve with testing, such as improving the software’s speed, enhancing the responsiveness, or determining the scalability.

Select KPIs

It is also important to identify the specific metrics that will be used to measure the performance of the application. After determining your testing objectives, you must select the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure the performance of the testing. Examples of KPIs include page load time, resource utilization, and error rates.

Build and Execute Tests

Once you have determined what the objectives of your UI performance testing are, and you have your KPIs in place, you can begin the building process for your tests. This involves creating test scripts to simulate different user scenarios, such as logging in, browsing, and interacting with different GUI elements. Ranorex Studio simplifies this stage of the testing process by allowing you to build your testing scenarios without any coding knowledge needed.

Assess and Adjust

Once you have completed the building stage of your testing process, you can then run your tests. This will allow you to analyze the results and assess what is needed to be done in order to adjust the results. This is where your objectives and KPIs become necessary, as you utilize them to assess the success of your testing. Your results may indicate that you need to make changes to your testing process or to the application itself.

UI Testing Best Practices

To improve the overall performance of UI testing, there are several best practices that you can use to increase the accuracy and reliability of your tests.

Early and Frequent Testing

If you test early enough, you are able to catch issues before they develop into much larger problems. Testing early in the development process allows you to address issues when they are significantly easier to fix. Frequent testing also ensures that one small issue doesn’t snowball into a larger problem over various iterations of your software.

Be Realistic with Your Test Data

Realistic test data will help you to accurately reflect how users interact with your software. Be sure to not only focus on the data that users will enter into the application but also the variety of paths that the user may take through the application.

Prioritize Your Testing

Not all of the testing that you want to complete for your software will have the same importance. That is why it is so important to prioritize based on which one will have the highest likelihood of failure so that you can focus on addressing the shortcomings that lead to that test’s failure.

Don’t Forget About Nonfunctional Tests

Nonfunctional tests, such as performance and security testing, are just as important as functional tests. These tests can help ensure that your application performs well under heavy load and is secure from potential attacks.

Update Your Test Scripts

Test scripts are prone to becoming outdated over time. That is why it is so important to regularly review and update them as necessary. This will not only help ensure that your tests accurately reflect the current state of the application, but it will also help you ensure that any changes to the application are properly tested.

Make Use of Test Automation

Test automation tools like Ranorex Studio help to simplify the testing process, especially when dealing with UI performance testing. Ranorex Studio helps you to quickly create and run tests without the need for extensive coding knowledge. It also provides you with detailed reporting information to help you better assess your testing results.

Start a Free Trial of Ranorex Studio

UI performance testing is made easy with the help of Ranorex Studio. With an array of tools, including codeless test automation as well as comprehensive reports, you can resolve issues that arise as soon as they’re detected. To try out a free trial of Ranorex Studio for yourself, contact us today.