How Does Performance Testing Directly Influence Your Business?

When you are unable to manage an unusual amount of orders during the holiday season, for example, your web application performance has a direct influence on your online business. Performance, particularly observed load time, is very essential for a positive user experience. A page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load will be dropped by 53% of users, and a one-second lag may cost online retailers millions of dollars every year in sales. The average price of a network outage, according to Gartner, is $5,600 per minute. The worst-case situation is that your website goes down on Black Friday.

Unfortunately, if you are not able to manage a rising number of concurrent users, this may occur. Ecommerce companies employ a lot of money on advertising, yet the raised traffic that marketing brings might grab them off a surprise. Web application performance testing, especially load testing, should be performed on a regular basis to avoid performance concerns and produce consistent, optimal performance below a variety of scenarios.

Entrepreneurs don’t  to know how to load a website in detail, but a basic awareness of operations that are important to your business and for which you pay is beneficial. This article will explain you what performance testing is, when it is done, and how it is done. For this idea, hiring a professional company that gives performance testing services is a good idea.

Best Practices in Performance Testing

Load testing should be performed on a frequent basis to give the optimal user experience. There are a few ‘best periods’ to measure web application performance:

• When the product is virtually completed(all important features have been included);
• Once the application has attained a state of functional stability;
• Following a code update or the setup of new hardware or software;
• Individual product units or modules (e.g., to evaluate the pace of interaction between microservices);
• When the website has grown by a certain level;
• Before events when you predict an increment in the number of web visitors;
• Following a low-scoring consumer sentiment study or a poor user satisfaction test;
• If you’ve seen that the site is struggling in ways it hasn’t before.

Load testing is conducted by many firms that use the Waterfall process after the software development process or whenever a new version is issued. Load testing web applications should be performed on a regular basis by agile teams. Stress testing should be done on a regular basis, particularly before major events such as Black Friday, ticket sales for a big show, or elections. This will ensure that you are aware of the system’s endurance capabilities and that you are equipped to deal with any unexpected traffic spikes or performance challenges that may arise.

Mission-critical applications, such as space launch projects or life-saving medical devices, should be fully tested to guarantee that they work as expected over an extended period of time.

1. Define the Testing environment as well as the tools that will be used 

Software, hardware, and networks are all set up in a testing environment to manage performance tests. Early on, developers must define the physical test and production environments, as well as the tools ready and any performance testing problems.

One of the performance testing best exercises is to test in the actual production system or a copy of it. If a live site is being tested, many organizations prefer to do it outside of peak hours to avoid causing difficulties for real users. If performance testing in the identical production environment is not possible, a subset of the production system with several servers of the same or lower specification may be used instead. At the very least, the team should attempt to match the hardware elements, operating system and settings, network, databases, software requirements, and other programs that are employed on the production system.

It’s important to imitate production settings as much as possible for load and stress testing in order to obtain an accurate picture of web performance. Occasionally, this entails attacking the app with millions of requests. Most organizations currently use load testing tools or services rather than doing it manually. The protocols established, licensing cost, system requirements, and platform help all influence which tools are used for testing.

2. Set Objectives and Performance Acceptability Criteria

We carefully examine the customer’s requirements and business requirements before doing performance testing. It’s important to establish whether the system meets the needs of the clients. We also do system analysis and produce a preliminary list of suggestions for load testing and situations that might overwhelm the system, such as picture uploads, file production, or transferring significant volumes of data.

The QA team should test the most common flows for your users and decide which metrics are most critical to them as well as the web app’s performance in the browser and on the server.

3. Create and Plan Performance Evaluations

A clear testing plan must be produced by the team. A kind of end-users must be simulated, performance test data must be organized, and metrics must be defined. The testers create critical situations to test for all use cases as well as some specific scenarios that the app is likely to face. They require to know what those people were doing to discover why performance decreases at a specific number of users. Different user trips should also be represented according to the amount of those travels in various periods during the test, representing probable traffic peaks.

4. Set up your Testing Environment

The team sets up the testing tools and builds a specialized testing environment that closely matches real-world settings, as well as automating deployment to that environment. If an online store, for instance, receives a large number of overseas visitors, it needs a corresponding infrastructure as well as load testing scripts that involve tasks done by virtual users. Then they must automate the beginning of the performance tests as well as the recording of the results.

5. Put the Test Plan into Action

The performance tests are generated by the team in accordance with the test design. They set up the situation setting and schedule before performing it. A large amount of unique data should be available in the data pool, and the number of users for each situation or script should be defined.

6. Carry out the tests

The team manages and supervises the tests, as well as accumulating the results. The run-time transaction, Web resource, system resource, network latency, and other monitors may all be used to monitor a situation. At least two rounds of testing are routinely performed by teams. The first round gives an opportunity to detect any potential issues.

The team then repeats the tests, both with the same settings under the same circumstances to establish consistency and with alternative settings to see what occurs. The team may require further testing redundancies based on the results.

7. Conduct an Analysis, Fine-Tune, And Retest

The team may evaluate the test findings using graphs and reports generated during scenario execution once the web app’s performance has been covered with data. They may now discuss their outcomes and go to work on fixing any problems that have arisen. They fine-tune the software and then conduct the tests using the same and other parameters to see how much better it is.

Also Read: Everything You Need To Know About Stress Testing Your Software

CONCLUSION

For an online company, a software’s continuous level of performance has several benefits. Performance should be seen as a important element of a software product, and testing should be a continuous method that is integrated into the complete strategy.

The majority of performance problems are related to speed. Testing the performance of a website or application helps you to improve it and its overall performance, following in a better user experience, lower bounce rates, more customer satisfaction, more conversions, and more sales and income. You can be aware of any prospective problems and prepare how to deal with them in advance by using several sorts of performance testing. Hiring a professional organization that caters performance testing services is a good idea in this case.

When it comes to QA, nothing is better than having the correct people in charge. That’s why we make sure that everyone in our team is qualified and accredited on some of the industry’s best practices. 

At TestUnity we have an expert team of QA Engineers. This enables us to give our clients the support they require to make sure that their software hits the market in the right circumstances. Contact us for a free consultation and see for yourself why TestUnity’s QA approach is the best choice for your software.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.