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Delivering fast and reliable apps is key for businesses to stay ahead and meet user needs – even if they don’t originally see themselves as a tech firm. Performance testing is a key ingredient to delivering high-performing apps as it will make sure it can handle normal and high traffic while offering a smooth experience.
Dangers of Neglecting Performance Testing
Neglecting performance testing can lead to some serious problems. It can immediately frustrate users and lose sales. If this continues, the brand can quickly get damaged. Slow or unresponsive apps often push users to switch to competitors, negatively impacting customer loyalty.
J.Crew’s 2018 Black Friday sale is an unpleasant but necessary example of this. Their website faced major issues, such as slow loading times and checkout errors, causing shoppers’ carts to empty during the process. These problems continued into Cyber Monday, with site availability dropping to 84.75%. According to Business Insider, these failures cost J.Crew around $775,000 in lost sales within just five hours.
While not an app specifically, Ticketmaster recently allowed users to queue up (virtually) for Oasis tickets for up to 12 hours despite them having been sold out the entire time. Some switched to other ticket sites, but the lasting damage was a deeper distrust in the website.
Fixing performance problems after a release is also much costlier and more difficult than addressing them early on. Research shows fixing a bug post-launch can cost up to 15 times more than catching it during the design stage. Performance testing helps teams find and fix these issues before release, reducing costly fixes later and ensuring a smooth user experience.
Key Benefits of Performance Testing
Performance testing can primarily help to enhance user experience. By finding and fixing performance issues, it keeps apps from becoming unstable. This ultimately boosts user satisfaction as modern users expect reliability and lightening quick speeds.
Netflix conducts continuous performance testing to make sure there’s smooth streaming for millions of users at the same time. Their strategy involves using JMeter for load testing and Jenkins for coordination. They test new or updated services to measure performance and scalability. Netflix also follows a canary deployment model, where new code is gradually released to a small group of users before full deployment.
They rely on cloud infrastructure to quickly roll back to earlier versions if issues do arise. Through this thorough testing, Netflix has maintained a high-quality service. For example, performance testing showed the need for an extra caching layer (EVCache) on their Cassandra database to meet streaming demands.
Google’s obsession with speed also comes from ongoing performance testing. Their methods revolve around compressing images and minimizing unnecessary plugins and scripts. This helps browser caching for faster load times. By constantly monitoring page load times and aiming for sub-second responses, Google has set a high industry standard and understands performance better than anyone. Their commitment to speed has played a key role in their success, but it’s also incentivised it among web apps and the internet more broadly.
Performance testing helps businesses prevent costly downtime and system crashes too. By exposing weak spots before they cause problems, it helps avoid incidents like British Airways’ 2017 IT failure, which cost the company over $100 million. Or perhaps worse, the NHS hacking scandal.
Best Practices for Effective Performance Testing
One important best practice is to begin testing early and conduct reviews regularly. By starting tests early in development, potential issues are easier and cheaper to resolve. You can pay for testers, but if it’s an exciting product, many will do it for free in exchange for the early access.
Another one is to create realistic test scenarios that reflect real user behavior. Using tools like virtual users helps assess performance under different conditions. For example, Alibaba conducts load tests with virtual users before its Singles’ Day sale to ensure the platform can handle the massive traffic spike. With the advent of AI, AI-controlled browsers (or apps) are becoming possible. This could help automate the process of realistic testing, and it will be quick to scale up and down.
You must also set clear performance goals that are measurable. Tracking response times, resource usage and error rates are some KPIs that help pinpoint areas that need improvement. Setting benchmarks ensures applications meet performance standards.
Collaborating between development and testing teams needs to be done effectively. Though, it’s important to keep in mind that outsourcing some of your performance testing to a third-party can help with objectivity. In fact, it’s become a fast-track way to get performance testing done right, and often much quicker too. Infosys, Tech Mahindra and Qalified.com are three such examples.
Final Word
Robust performance testing is a non-neogitable when developing a high performing app. It’s vital and cheaper to spot issues before launch. There are some more efficient ways to go about it, and it’s possible that AI will play an increasing role. However, for now, outsourcing some of this burden to a third party has become the norm, and it will be these companies that can access any scalable AI innovations first.
