Have you ever experienced this? Too many people wanting something from you at the same time? When your email is so swamped with inquiries and requests, your phone is constantly ringing, and there are people knocking at the door. You want to cater to all of them. Yet, you simply freeze for a moment and just want to stop doing anything. Everyone has those days now and then, and your software is no exception. You need to cater to it – to meet that competitive edge which propels your business or application to the success you dreamed of.

We now live in a world of high-performing applications that – fulfill a need, seem better over the competitors, look great to the eye, and remain flawless- no matter how harsh the user behaves. In order for an application to meet the expectations of such customers (or users) – the more the better for sales to happen – there is something critically needed right inside its anatomy. What is it? Performance Testing.  

Performance tests done right – this has become an inevitable secret to the success of some of world’s most successful software and applications.

Performance Testing Critical is in the software development life cycle. Why?

High-performance is no longer just a buzz word. It is a differentiator for your application to be found, secured and demanded. So, how would you measure the performance of your application, to be able to prove it is “high-performing”? Think.

Performance testing and its different parameters not only help uphold the fact that your application is good enough, but also remove the flaws. In a nutshell, Performance Testing demonstrates how a system acts and responds in different scenarios. A system may perform perfect with a set of 10,000 users. However, you need to ensure it performs the same with 10 times the number of users you originally planned for.

Besides the performance and scalability, you would want your application to run at a breakneck speed and that too, without any instances of crashing. There are several sorts of performance testing – each of which mimics a distinct user situation.

What Performance Testing Can Help you Fix

Application Speed

A user is impatient and flooded with choices. He is always at the liberty to abandon you to moment the experience breaks. A poor load speed can be one of the causes for leakage in the experiences. This is where Performance Testing can help you assess how the application behaves under different scenarios. You cannot blame it on the internet all the time, and the users are smart enough to identify whether it is the internet or the app – which is failing to load.

Scalability

Often, little consideration is paid to the capacity needs or an application’s ability to scale. The size and geography of the end-user community may be overlooked in the application’s design and planned deployment methodology. Many applications are created and tested with little attention to the following considerations:

  1. How many end users are likely to utilize the application?
  2. Where can I find these end users?
  3. How many of these end customers will utilize it at the same time?
  4. How will end users access the application?
  5. How many more end users will need access to the application in the future?
  6. What will the final application landscape look like in terms of server count and location?

Performance testing can help address these in a stable landscape.

Stability

Just as your stability comes to a real test when you are the most strained, an application has to undergo such tests to ensure they do not perish with load. You’d, indeed, want your application to function properly at all times. There will be moments when it is subjected to more strain than others. Sale days, for example, are not the times when you want your e-Commerce application be down. Depending upon your industry, the load days can be different. Even a few minutes of downtime may cost you high in terms of loosing immediate and long-term engagements.

Performance Testing comes into the picture here to see many users can you support before the system’s present infrastructure fails; How much money do you stand to lose if you don’t know how many users your software can support.

To put it another way, you should plan for peaks as much as you plan for troughs.

Eliminating Bottlenecks with Performance Testing

Testers can detect system flaws and how they affect overall functionality. Performance can help you answer the following questions:

-Is the app prone to crashing during moments of high user traffic?

-Are there errors occuring at run-time under different scenarios?

-Is the time required to complete a request longer or shorter than expected?

Performance testing teams can get information by answering these and related questions, and fixing the identified faults.

Assessing Whether Performance Objectives were Met

There is no set time frame for teams to execute Performance Testing initiatives; it varies from project to project. Performance testing phases, on the other hand, might be linked to other project milestones or when various needs are built out.

After each loop or development phase, testers can compare QA findings to the expectations of the customer or to the goals that QAs established for themselves. Performance testing may provide another layer of validation to software development by aligning the product owner’s vision with the duties of developers.

What do Businesses Stand to Lose in the Absence of Performance Testing?

To pull their weight, modern enterprises require digital solutions. Enterprises rely on increasingly sophisticated digital technologies to analyze and respond to changing market landscapes and the requirements of its consumers.

When organizations want dependable and scalable software, performance testing is a critical component of the development process. Businesses that seek performance testing best practices through teams are better equipped to build solutions and are responsive to all of their users’ needs — especially when the software needs to accommodate to high levels of traffic

Software that performs better while serving fewer people is a burden rather than an asset. Performance testing may assist teams in understanding existing flaws in a system and provide stakeholders with a relevant baseline against which to assess improvement throughout the development lifecycle.

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Written by Infiwave Solutions