10 Best Reasons Why Performance Testing is Important to Invest

Heard Website Crash?

Website crashes and performance issues have been disrupting the online space. The recent crash was the most dramatic when the HBO website crashed as the famed fantasy show Game of Thrones Season 7 went LIVE. On July 16, 2017, as this popular show went LIVE, the HBO site’s streaming service crashed, leading to disappointing tweets from the fan club. Earlier in the year, the Nordstrom website crashed on a big shopping day, where the cardholders could not get early access to its Anniversary Sale. These and many such instances emphasize why Performance Testing is required and the need to invest in it.

Reasons Why You Should Invest in Performance Testing

Performance testing software helps check an application’s behavior across various situations. A system can work effectively with a particular number of concurrent users but might get dysfunctional with additional thousands during peak traffic. Need of Performance testing helps ensure to evaluate and establish the software application’s speed, scalability, and stability. There are varied types of Performance tests that simulate various possible user scenarios and understand the behavior of the applications.

Increasing competition in the digital space and the need to be present in the top ranking of the category makes Performance Testing critical for enterprises. Ensuring speed, stability, dependability, and scalability of the application is essential. Application is built with certain expectations and is supposed to give decided results. For instance, an online gaming application has to display certain actions to deliver the right experience.

Performance testing doesn’t necessarily display defects in an application. It has to ensure that the application performs as expected irrespective of the network fluctuations, bandwidth availability, or traffic load. It is practically a subset of the wider performance engineering picture, focusing on performance issues in the design and architecture of software. So, designing and executing these tests are critical for ensuring website stability.

An effective performance testing strategy is essential for highlighting most performance issues. It could be associated with the database, network, software, bandwidth, or hardware. Performance Testing follows industry-defined benchmarks to ensure the application behaves in a particular way. Precision and close scrutiny of the testing results is the core responsibility of Performance Testing Software.

There are some key reasons why performance testing is required and critical for enterprises/businesses to invest in Performance Testing. Automation of Performance tests adds tremendous value to the application testing process. Various tools are being leveraged to weigh diverse aspects of the application – including Licensed and Open Source tools.

1.Engage customers with better website speed

A slow and lousy website will never draw a good audience. In fact, it will repel the crowd coming to the site. Automated testing tools enable teams to check the speed and performance of the website. With basic connectivity and bandwidth access, users can load the site, sustaining their interest and keeping them engaged.

2.Most importantly, the faster the website, the more revenue it will generate

Though this holds true for almost all websites, but is of great relevance for businesses that need a direct interface with customers. For instance, banking and e-commerce applications must provide customers with an easy and secure gateway. Consequently, there is better traction and repeated visits to the application.

3.Resolve glitches before it goes to the market

As mentioned earlier, Performance Testing is expected to ensure the application performs as expected. Various types of Performance Testing Software help you to achieve the expected results and resolve the risks that might impair the application in real-world scenarios.

Fail-over Tests verify redundancy mechanisms, Reliability tests run high-level loads for longer spans, and Stress Tests gauge the load the system/application can take. This helps exploit the application to reveal glitches, which is essential for making the application market-ready.

4.Enhance the application’s robustness

It is important for enterprises to ensure that the applications remain sturdy even during the most critical times – network issues, cyber-attacks, or virtual threats. Performance Testing with various tests and tools ensures the sturdiness of the application to sustain in the marketplace and perform relentlessly.

For instance, Targeted Infrastructure Tests are isolated tests that check each layer of an application to identify performance issues that can cause hiccups while delivering the desired performance.

5.Support Market claims

It is critical for businesses to verify that the application/software works the way it claims. This factor is most relevant for online gaming applications and software. It is expected to take the load of concurrent gamers and deliver the speed and performance as promised.

Various statistics are collected during the execution of tests to ensure and meet performance goals, especially Speed, Scalability, and Stability. This helps identify performance issues.

6.Enhance Scalability

With the challenges in the digital space, enterprises need to build scalable applications that can be upgraded in real-time. Performance Testing software exposes the possible vulnerabilities within an application and identifies where it has to be strengthened to accept upgrades and changes to get more scalable.

Analyzing the statistics from test executions can help teams identify any possible issues and capabilities of an application.

7.Bring stability and dependability within an application

An application in every possible form has to be stable and deliver consistent results, irrespective of any changes in its features. With specific performance tests, teams can gauge whether any recent changes or frequent releases are causing disruption in the behavior of the application.

8.Check various technology stacks

Software applications are getting complex, which has led to the implementation of various technology stacks. This is critical for ensuring expected performance and deliverables. Performance testing software helps identify the weak links within the technology stack used for the application.

9.Build responsiveness of an application

Various freely available and paid tools check the speed of websites and applications. Both open-source and licensed tools can be implemented to ensure performance tests.

Most Performance Testing tools are browser-based, and testing can be done simultaneously to ensure the application is compatible across various platforms and browsers. Responsiveness is absolutely critical for enterprises to achieve an organization’s business objectives.

10.Identify issues related to Database and APIs

Sourcing data and ensuring the performance of your Application Program Interface (API) is critical today. Performance tests such as Load/Stress tests enable teams to determine the application’s behavior and help check whether the server responds to the user with data in a stipulated time gap. It further helps to gauge the behavior and performance of the API under heavy load, which is a must-do.

Conclusion

Investing in performance testing is obviously paramount today for the success of organizations that can select either open-source or licensed testing tools for ensuring the best performance of their product. However, to ensure the best speed, reduce bugs, identify DB issues, and create a robust and responsive website or application, it is imperative to set clear testing objectives while choosing the right software testing tool, infrastructure, and technologies.

Cigniti’s Performance Testing expertise spans many applications, including client-server, web, distributed, mobile, cloud databases, high-volume transaction systems, and highly complex applications. Cigniti’s Performance Center of Excellence (PCoE) provides end-to-end performance testing solutions to help our clients launch future-proof applications with high responsiveness, availability, and scalability.

Connect with us to ensure flawless performance of your business applications and deliver sure-fire solutions to your end-customers.