Recent progress in the IT technologies requires adequate changes in Quality Engineering. QE must fit into the concept of Quality by Design, enable efficiency of SRE, support quality and agility in DevOps implementations to maximise value output while minimising the resources and turnaround times. Currently accepted methodologies of performance testing and capacity analysis have limited benefit/cost ratio and need to be enhanced to fit the requirements of the day. Exploratory performance testing (XPT) provides flexible methodologies to maximise the value while controlling resource investment and maintaining shortened development cycles. The approach utilises dynamic reproduction of wide-range load conditions based on key business flows and production data.

Unlike the traditional fixed-load performance simulation targeting system responsiveness at peak-load conditions, the XPT explores all spectrum of load magnitudes, providing deeper insight in the limits of the system capacity and performance, thus allowing more conscientious approach to the continuous testing, full-range visibility into the quality attributes for DevOps and Golden Signals for SRE. Enriched information provided by XPT improves feedback into the Development stages and facilitates the Shift Left ideology. The full-range load analysis and exploration of the extreme conditions, similarly to chaos engineering, allows to ensure robustness of the solution in question. XPT delivers richer information about the system with the same, or sorter preparation time. This makes the approach a good candidate for performance validation in an Agile setup.

Leaner XPT approach with more comprehensive results’ output, including all the non-automated channels of the performance metric acquisition, allows to acquire the data for early performance analysis and tuning, thus facilitating the Quality by Design paradigm.