Why is Performance Testing Important for your Brand and Bottom Line?

 


Today’s customers look for software applications that are aesthetically appealing, rich in content, safe, and capable of working seamlessly across devices. In short, they want the applications to provide a great user experience. Organizations have realized the critical role of user experience in the success of their applications. Hence, they are focusing on performance testing to ensure the scalability, reliability, efficiency, and responsiveness of the applications. Importantly, it is only by implementing a robust performance testing strategy that your software application can handle a situation where more users use the application seamlessly at the same time.

This becomes evident during big sales days like Black Friday. It has been observed that many eCommerce sites/apps face outages when thousands of shoppers visit them at the same time. Outages in the form of latency or downtime can cause user frustration and drive them to competitors. Thus, the non-performance of your website or app during the most crucial time can turn out to be extremely costly and hurt your bottom line. The only way to prepare your website or app to manage the extra load is by subjecting it to rigorous performance testing.

What is performance testing?

Performance testing helps to determine how a software application system performs in terms of speed, robustness, stability, and responsiveness when subjected to a specific workload. The indicators for application performance testing to consider include the following:

·         Consumption of memory and processors

·         Response time of the network, browser, and page

·         Processing time of server request

·         Acceptable volume of concurrent users

A robust performance testing approach reveals how a software application system will behave and respond to different situations. For example, the application may run smoothly with 1000 concurrent users, but how will it respond when the number is increased to, say, 10,000?

Since good user experience lies at the core of an application achieving success in the market, its absence can lead users to junk the application. This can have a direct bearing on the brand’s performance and the bottom line of the business.

Why is performance testing critical for your business?

In today’s digital age, the superior performance of your online platform (website/app) can lead to an increase in sales for your business. To achieve the same, performance testing services help determine how the software application performs in terms of the following parameters:

Page speed: The users of your software application can face an increased level of frustration when the pages do not load as quickly as expected. Especially, when users are in the middle of a financial transaction and the software page takes forever to load, there is a simultaneous increase in frustration and loss of trust in the brand. According to statistics, a load time of 1 – 3 seconds can increase the user’s bounce rate by 32%. This can go up to 123% when the load time is of 1 – 10 seconds (Source: Hostingtribunal.com). Again, the slow loading speed of pages can hit the ranking of your website or app in the search results. Thus, performance testing can check the page load time of your website or app when a certain volume of concurrent users are there. This allows developers to increase the page load speed by executing certain procedures.

Scalability: With the growth in your user traffic and business, your application system should be expanded to accommodate more users. This isn’t possible to achieve unless you know the number of users the system can support by adding another CPU to the server. Also, what will the page load speed be in such a situation? All such information can be garnered by executing application performance testing.

Stability: Your website or application should ideally work consistently at all times. However, there are times when your system's load is higher, such as on Black Friday. On such days, when a larger number of your target customers visit your site or app to get information or buy stuff, the site or app should perform seamlessly. You would not want your system to crash, face downtime, or latency during such days, because the consequences can be very costly for your business. This is why stress testing has become crucial to determining the number of users the existing system can handle before reaching the breaking point.

Conclusion

Performance testing should be a priority before your website or application is deployed for actual use. It should be incorporated early in the development lifecycle to fix bugs or vulnerabilities, thereby saving time, effort, and money. A robust performance testing methodology enables you to understand if the website or app has the capability to handle a large volume of user traffic – an important criteria for delivering a superior customer experience.

Resource

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Article Source: medium.com


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discuss Test Orchestration and its Role in Achieving Optimal Quality of Software

Image
  In the DevOps approach of developing, testing, and delivering software applications, there is a need to accelerate testing within the constraints of budget and time. This entails automating the testing process as part of the testing strategy. In many cases, continuous test automation is often considered as a discrete step in the build pipeline rather than a sequence of steps. For any continuous testing strategy, all software applications need to pass through a series of tests before they pass muster in the crucible of quality. These may include unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, smoke testing, performance testing, security testing, and others. For DevOps QA testing, each of these tests should be subjected to automation to enhance quality, reduce test time, and improve the certainty of software behavior. However, merely automating the tests left, right, and center does not augur well when it comes to achieving an optimal quality level as well as minimizing the ...
Read more

What is the Importance of Compatibility Testing for a Software Application?

Image
  Customers are wont to use software applications for various purposes across device platforms, networks, operating systems, and browsers. They expect the software applications to perform seamlessly irrespective of the digital environments. However, customer experience in real-time does not always achieve such performance causing disgruntlement. In an industry where new devices are launched with different configurations, and new versions of operating systems, frameworks, and browsers are released in a few weeks or months, ensuring the software application perform seamlessly across platforms can be a herculean task. Moreover, since it is practically impossible to evaluate each customer’s usage of a device, browser, operating system, or network, it is imperative to ensure the software application functions properly across digital environments. This calls for integrating compatibility testing in the SDLC. What is compatibility testing and why is it important? Compatibility testing...
Read more

How many Types of Mobile App Testing Services are there?

Image
  The utilitarian value of mobile phones has been mainly due to the plethora of applications that are accessed by users to perform a raft of activities. These may include watching movies, paying utility bills, booking tickets, playing games, reading informative content, and buying merchandise, among others. Does this mean users lap up every application on offer? The answer is an emphatic NO as users look for attributes such as fast loading time, enhanced security, seamless navigability, and many others. Even as businesses are aware of the need to employ mobile testing services and ensure the release of quality applications, the pressure to remain competitive often overrides such considerations. Statistics show that approximately 68.07 percent of mobile applications never reach 1,000 downloads (Statista). In other words, approximately 67 percent of mobile app developers do not make a profit. So, what is the way out and ensure the apps hit the bull’s eye of customers’ approval? It’s ...
Read more