Over the past decade companies, large and small have started with the integration of load and performance testing into their development process. There are many good reasons for this evolution. In this post will outline why testing of performance requirements has become so popular.
Naturally, load & performance testing reduces the risk of severe outages or system failures dramatically. Even if hundreds of your software testers conduct thousands of manual tests on a new application, this is no guarantee that the system can handle the expected load pattern on production. A typical application works fine under normal load or data volume conditions. Depending on the design and implementation decisions the end-to-end response times often rise when the new system needs to handle a certain number of concurrent user requests.
Our professional user community expects high-speed applications, and with the growing service portfolio, your user sits more and more on the driver seat. The response time of a business application determines whether you hold your customers or lose commercial revenue. Optimized high-speed applications will make customers happy, and satisfied users will often return. Therefore, the spending in performance testing is an excellent investment.
Companies invest plenty money in search engine optimization and neglect an even more important aspect, the actual speed of their application. Maybe this is still not well known, but search engines rate applications with low speed or pure application design down. Obviously, it is better to improve the response time prior making investments in search engine optimizations.
Hardware sizing is often guesswork with a sad end. Oversized infrastructure is a waste of money, and a shortage of system resources can have a severe impact on user experience. Load and performance tests eliminate this try and error exercises. Simply simulate the average load on the new system and verify if system resource utilization is within the recommended boundaries is enough for an appropriate investment in IT infrastructure.
Our online business relies on image and reputation. Major players such as Amazon or Apple understood that slow loading or not responding applications lead to a negative user impression and damages their reputation as a leading actor. Continuous performance tests help to detect hotspots proactively and protect your users from this nasty touch of not reliable applications.
Organizations working in the firefighting mode understood that this endless war room sessions are frustrating for customers and also for IT staff. You can’t tune and eliminate performance hotspots on production because this kills your trustability. Users will forget failures in your product, but they will always remember that this application is slow.
Stop wasting your money and integrate performance testing into your development process.