With the rise of mobile devices user experience has become more critical than ever before. We have the internet in our pocket, browse through our favorite sites multiple times a day, receive push notifications from our loved ones and buy products online whenever we identify something attractive.
This usage pattern is, both, beneficial for those who sell goods online and a challenge for IT service providers. In this post, I will shine a light on how to attract more customer and win the race for outstanding user experience and highly responsive applications.
Life cycle integration and proactivity are the two most important aspects of the performance value chain. If you don’t uncover reliability hotspots quickly after they are introduced, you may run in delays, which results in firefighting on production and massive rework.
Once a slow or not responsive App is deployed to your user community, the chance is very high that your return on sales declines. My strategy for such performance nightmares roots on proactivity. It includes early and continuous performance validation throughout the development pipeline on one hand and also shift right, continuous performance monitoring at production, on the other hand.
Performance Testing
Shift left intends to find problem spots earlier in the life cycle. For sure, it’s a top business priority to launch new products quickly. Erroneous applications are holding us back and blocking more developer resources than expected, which results in delays of subsequent sprints. Automation is a grand strategy to tackle many errors after they have been introduced.
This is not only true for functional inspections, but also a validation of non-functional requirements such as vulnerability scan, load tests, spike tests or long duration tests are highly efficient the earlier you execute them in your development chain. Ideally, you integrate those validations of agreed NFRs in your development pipeline to assess the quality of a new build immediately after it has been deployed and escalate deviations on time to your development teams. Performance testing is your chance to find more critical hotspots early in your DevOps chain, which protects your investments.
Monitoring
Excellent user experience is critical to good business and happy customers. Think about your last negative experience with one of your formerly favorite shopping sites. You won’t use it anymore after you’ve experienced hanging, not responding or very slow web pages. This behavior is quite typical for all customers out there. People abandon using applications once they experienced response times of 3 seconds or above, and the chance of never returning is quite high.
Did this ring your alarm bells? Monitoring of availability and response times at production is ultimately required to identify and escalate slowdowns before your customers get affected.
Combining both
We’ve learned that the point in time when we identify hotspots can make our lives as support or developers much more comfortable because it gives us more time to implement a fix and results in fewer tickets from angry customers. The combination of both, load testing and monitoring, is your chance to understand how the new system behaves under production load conditions and at the same time you can figure out how powerful your monitoring solution is. Powerful monitoring platforms make the seek for the needle in the haystack much easier.
Takeaway
Performance Testing: Simulation of current and future growth in user volumes on your application under test. Test execution on pre-prod stages. The objective is to find and fix critical design, coding, or reliability issues which would slow down your business applications.
Monitoring: We distinguish between active and passive monitoring. Active monitoring is a probing of single user requests. Passive monitoring is collecting performance metrics while your real users are navigating through your applications. The objective of monitoring is to identify hotspots before your customers or end-users gets affected and escalate those issues to your support teams in charge.
Keep doing the right things! Contact me to get rid of nasty reliability issues.