Why one should not skip Application Performance Testing?

In the age of customers expecting instant gratification through digital devices and applications, businesses should not cut corners when it comes to delivering fast, responsive, and secure user experiences. Hence, in order to ensure that your organization’s software performs optimally and does not falter on parameters of speed, security, efficiency, scalability, responsiveness, and performance, it should be subjected to stringent application performance testing.

Types of performance testing

The criticality of performance testing in terms of assuring the stability, reliability, and scalability of an application is well established. The various types of performance testing underline its importance and relevance in ensuring customer satisfaction.

Stress testing: Here, an application is pushed beyond normal load conditions to check the components that fail first. In other words, it identifies the breaking point of the application.

Spike testing: Evaluates the capability of the application to handle a sudden increase in traffic volume.

Load testing: Evaluates the application’s performance under a high volume of traffic.

Volume testing: Evaluates the application’s ability to handle large data volumes and check its response time and behavior.

Scalability testing: Measure the application’s attributes like throughput, response time, transaction processing speed, network usage, and others.

Implications of skipping application performance testing

With customer satisfaction becoming the sole determinant in ensuring the success of any software application in the market, skipping performance testing can prove to be disastrous for business enterprises.

User dissatisfaction: Statistics suggest that users are unlikely to use an application and opt for its competitor if it fails to load within 3 seconds. Since the attention span of users is decreasing with each passing day, they want the application to load without buffering. It is only through a cogent performance testing approach that the application system can be maintained properly and any defects are fixed before being delivered to the end-user.

Fail to determine load threshold: Every software application should have a load threshold that shows the volume of traffic it can handle without facing issues like latency, downtime, or crashes. Performance testing helps in determining the load threshold the software can handle, and in its absence, measuring the application’s performance in terms of scalability, load capability, efficiency, and speed will not be possible. This can have serious implications for the business, especially during the days of high sales such as Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, and others.

If a sizeable number of users flock to your website or application on such days with the expectation of making sales but end up facing latency or downtime, the negative impression can drive away many existing and prospective customers. For example, thanks to the unpreparedness of eCommerce chains like Walmart or Costco to cater to the increased rush of online shoppers on Black Friday, Walmart ended up losing $9 million in just 150 minutes. Not to be outdone, Costco had to look at a staggering loss of $11 million due to its website crashing for more than 16 hours.

Losing brand reputation: Building a brand is important for a company to attract customers, and it often takes years to accomplish the same. However, one unfortunate moment of taking short cut or being unprepared can ruin the meticulously built brand reputation of a company. In the above-mentioned examples of Walmart and Costco, unsatisfied customers had flooded social media with scathing messages for these companies. As a result, these behemoths had to do with a lot of negative publicity and loss of brand equity. Such negative publicity can be the proverbial death knell for smaller companies as they will find it well-nigh impossible to crawl back.

Bottlenecks leading to poor quality: With users becoming more demanding regarding the quality of an application, the lack of pursuing a performance testing strategy can let the bottlenecks or glitches within the application remain undetected. These issues can cause the application to falter in terms of handling traffic, delivering accurate outcomes, speed, and efficiency. So, instead of addressing such issues beforehand and let customers enjoy superior experiences, the software can suffer from a series of inadequacies.

Instability: Your application must be robust and stable for the customers to use and derive a slew of benefits. If the right performance testing methodology is not used or skipped altogether the reliability, recoverability, and uptime of the application and its data can get compromised. In the DevOps scheme of development where continuous integration, testing, and delivery are the norms, skipping application performance testing can be detrimental for your business and reputation.

Conclusion

Quality assurance is the bedrock against which the performance of any software application is judged. Organizations should work towards creating a Centre of Excellence wherein testers can access advanced automation test tools and leverage them to strengthen the application’s performance. Further, to guarantee user satisfaction and delight, organizations should incorporate performance engineering in the SDLC. Skipping such an important part of quality assurance can have serious implications for the organization.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality