No matter which business you are in, IT is your most critical success factor, and if these services fail, we suffer. Imagine a full business day without your mobile phone and your computer. Who would order your services without our convenient IT platforms? It took 20 years to become entirely dependent on reliable computerized services, but companies suffer within a few minutes of downtime.
A few weeks ago, I posted in one of my blogs, performance is our most important feature; if it fails, no other functionality will be accessible'. Customers are in a rush, and nobody enjoys slow loading websites or services. Chances are higher than 50 %, that a user who experienced slow loading services will never return.
In this post, I will share insights on how to align your performance strategy with your business. It would be best if you did not risk losing your most valuable good, your customers, due to performance problems. These insights below are a starting point. For a detailed assessment of your situation, please reach out to our team anytime.
We all agree that Performance is a complex feature. I think that's why it's still a neglected cousin of functional testing. There are important reasons we can't ignore it going forward because our business services suffer if they become impacted by load or performance issues.
How can we ensure reliable services?
It's not something magical because successful players are mastering this discipline for several years now. No matter what industry they are in, responsive and reliable IT services are essential. Think about online shopping, attending streaming events, online banking, or shopping your favorite goods. All of these transactions are expected to be completed within seconds.
At the very heart of fast loading websites and responsive services are these basic rules:
Rule 1 - Performance is part of your development stream
Rule 2 - Performance monitoring of all services
Rule 3 - Performance is a matter of everyone
Rule 4 - Performance is a journey
But, how should we align the Performance Strategy to our business?
The answer is to introduce a Risk-based Performance Testing and Monitoring strategy. We can't afford to apply performance tests and performance monitoring to all services. Remove the doubts by enforcing a Risk assessment. You introduce a policy to conduct this assessment for all your applications and changes. If the risk rating is high or medium, a certain level of performance testing and monitoring is obligatory.
Let me give you an example to bring more clarity
We will use the company BlockTrust in this case study, which revolutionized how companies manage their contracts. One Million customers are using their products and expect their most valuable goods to be stored fast and in a secure way.
Performance Strategy
Performance is king. We can't afford that our customers are getting impacted by slow loading contract forms. Performance engineering practices are a fundamental part of our entire value stream.
KPIs
Response time
System resource consumption
Availability
Validation
Design
CICD Pipeline
Major release E2E
Monitoring
Ai powered
Transaction tracing
Code-level insights
Anomaly detection
How the alignment of Performance to Business helps?
Research has shown that retailer increases their revenue by 10 % for every 1 second response time improvement. If we take a closer look at the fantastic benefits of building a performance first mindset, we realize that such businesses are highly innovative because their staff enjoys the freedom to provide reliable services. They design, develop, test, and tune their IT services for high performance, which automatically cuts down construction and operational costs.
I believe that many of us somehow already know that their reactive approach towards fast and responsive applications introduces high risks. Reliable services are vital in your customer's eyes; everything else is secondary.
Contact us anytime if you are keen to learn how a modern Performance strategy could help your business to bring back the freedom you deserve.
With users located anywhere, let's put Performance everywhere.