Recently a big player in America has been affected by a major reliability issue. This organization has ignored quality issues over years and run gradually into a cyberattack which has put thousands of credit records and their owners at risk. Forward-thinking companies transformed their development chain and integrated load testing in early development stages.
In this post, I will outline why non-functional viewpoints such as user volume, throughput, and response time are becoming more and more a fundamental part of many software projects.
1. Risk mitigation There is a high risk that an application can’t handle its real-world user and data volume. In a worst-case scenario, your application will crash on day one of production due to serious performance issues. Load testing is a proofed risk mitigation measure because it validates your new services under production like load conditions and reduces the likelihood that your new services will be affected by significant reliability problems.
2. Time to market Speed rules the world. Those who launch their new products too late or in a bad quality often experience significant cuts in revenue. Load testing helps you to proof your new system under production-like conditions early in the development lifecycle. The earlier you identify such hotspots; the easier are they to fix and the lower is the risk that those repairs will delay your go-live timeline.
3. Defect costs Performance hotspots are often difficult to solve because they root on failures in application design. If you eliminate performance hotspots during implementation or testing stages, you save up to 90 percent for each bug due to fewer downtimes and easier code-rework activities in those early stages.
4. Firefighting Your company started a marketing program for the new website. On day one, a few hundred of potential customers can’t use the new platform due to severe performance issues. Nobody want’s to be in such a scenario because suddenly the engineering work stops and trial and error phase begins. The pressure goes up, and the chance is high that they can’t fix those issues at production within a short time. Load testing prevents your organization from such smoke jumping scenarios.
5. War rooms Due to the high pressure of the actual slowdowns, your teams started to blame each other. Nobody wants to be responsible for this disaster. Less transparency across all units make it impossible to identify the cause of those performance issues.
6.User experience Customers expect fast and reliable websites. According to recent research, if page load times are 4 seconds or higher, every 2nd user will stop using those services. Load testing helps you to validate and improve user experience on pre-production stages. Once UX is within the agreed boundaries, you can deploy the new product into production.
7.Financial revenue Slow websites lead to increasing abandon rates and loss in commercial revenue. Your company spend real money for implementation of the new platform, started a tremendous marketing campaign and due to slow IT services you set this important project at risk.
8.Reputation Reputation is essential for your products. If websites are often not available or fail to deliver their intended services, your brand is in danger. Even if you bring your application to speed, those customers who experienced the slow loading website will keep this negative experience.
Many businesses have been hit by one of those unexpected surprises mentioned above. The risk of shipping an application into production without validation of non-functional requirements is too high. Don’t run in this pitfall and integrate load and performance testing into your development lifecycle.