The ubiquitous smartphones are making our world more techno-savvy than ever before. They are being used by people of all classes – from the simple village farmer to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. For businesses, it presents an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to all these people quickly through web and mobile applications.
Keeping this in mind, it is important for businesses to keep a tab on the web performance which accounts for the speed and reliability of web and mobile applications. The end-users expect a lot from their apps and a single-second delay in website response times translates to lost customers and reduced business. To ensure that customers are satisfied always, businesses should make use of performance testing tools through qualified software testers or quality assurance professionals.
What do Software Testers or Quality Assurance Professionals do?
Simply put, their job is to ensure superior application performance, particularly during times of peak traffic which can be the make-or-break moment for businesses. As applications have grown significantly more complex over the past decade, not to mention the range of devices available, they require whole new performance testing techniques and practices.
From the End User point of view:
The modern applications have evolved from simple to feature-rich composites offering broad functionality such as images with different angles, reviews, comparisons, social media plug-ins, RSS feeds and the likes. This variety/functionality though useful, can also lead to application slowdown. A good example would be Flipkart crashing after Mi 3 went on sale.
So even with an ‘advanced’ web application where ‘inside your code’ tools tell you that everything is running OK, there is no guarantee that it will run the same over the cloud and the server. The reasons may include issues such as geography, services, and the likes. But if you do a load test from the end user’s point of view and include that entire web application in the load test, it puts your business application in a much stronger position.
How to execute it?
Software testers usually follow the following pattern:-
- Understand client requirements
- Identify test environment
- Identify performance test acceptance criteria
- Determine individual user data and variances
- Create performance scenario.
- Choose best performance/ load test tool
- Tuning and optimizations
- Analysis with bottleneck and scalability
Tools:
There are many tools available in the market for performance testing. The tools can be selected based on your need and costs involved. There are proprietary as well as open-source load testing tools. These load testing tools ensure rock-solid application performance even in in times of peak traffic and extreme stress. Some of the open source tools include Apache JMeter, Grinder, OpenSTA, WebLoad and LoadUI.
On a Final Note:
Many businesses wait to do load testing only at a particular time just before going live. Don’t fall for that trap. Look at load testing from the end-user perspective, as an opportunity to optimize your business. Devote some time and resources to load testing not just before, but during and after application production as well. The opportunities for optimization will continue to present themselves at all stages. Load testing from the end-user perspective results in strategic, more informed test that helps guide decisive action addressing performance-impacting elements along the complete web application delivery chain.
