Part of developing a software application is ensuring it performs well in the real-time market. The last thing your company wants is for a long-anticipated product to quickly fail and cause customers to go running to your competitors. Performance testing should be an integral part of product development. Here are a few ways testing can help you address issues before your product goes live.
Mitigate Risks
You certainly don't want a website to perform improperly or even crash while you're running the new software. Using automated testing tools to analyze your product's performance can help you avoid a reputation-damaging scenario.
Some performance tests related to risk mitigation include:
• Capacity Tests: These tests ensure the application meets business requirements while checking performance goals against real-time peak loads.
• Comparison Tests: These compare new applications to old versions and assess performance while comparing properties to competing applications.
• Stress Tests: These tests ensure an application can perform at peak load times and measure how the application performs during heavy usage.
• Endurance Tests: These verify the application's performance over a long time period, check memory leaks and eliminate any issues that come about during extended heavy-load times.
• Component Level Tests: These ensure that component integration causes no interference with the existing system while fine-tuning individual application components.
Eradicate Bottlenecks
Performance testing can help you discover bottlenecks and address the system weaknesses. Start by checking for crashes that happen during extended periods. You can also determine if there are functions that generate too many errors or if some requests take longer to execute than you expected.
Say that you discover your product crashes while other applications are running on a system. You can consider managing application memory so that your product does not hog customers' systems by using too much data while it's open, thus preventing a bottleneck.
Establish Performance Requirements and Goals
You can consider setting performance goals along with other product development milestones. Your specific goals can vary depending on both your product and your timeline. They also may be assigned by your company, or they may be customer requirements. At different phases of development, testers can run quality assurance on the product and compare results to the predetermined specifications.
Setting goals along the development process can create benchmarks for your performance engineering teams. It's a good way of measuring progress, managing expectations and keeping stakeholders up to date.
Study Scalability
Your product must be ready to handle the real-time fluctuations of data volume, number of users and other workload changes. That's why testing your product for scalability is essential. Many factors can affect scalability, including:
• Memory and network usage
• Time to execute commands
• Response times
• Requests per unit of time
• Throughput
• Screen transition
While you can't plan for your product to perform flawlessly at all usage levels, you can set realistic parameters for what you anticipate to be a heavy load. Ensure your product can perform at that level. In some cases, you may need to sacrifice speed for scalability.
Check Location Performance
Your software product may run smoothly in Germany or the UK, but customers in Brazil or India may experience suboptimal performance. Sometimes these issues are beyond your control with product consumers, such as when the user relies on a slower network. Performance testing can help you understand how your product executes on different networks at various speeds, allowing you to make adjustments for optimal performance in the regions you expect the most traffic.
Improve Customer Experience
Naturally, the goal of any product is to create a good customer experience that makes it an asset to the user. Happy customers will recommend your product to others and increase your sales. Performance testing helps you achieve your ultimate goal by ensuring that you don't put software on the market with tons of bugs that turn off users and cause them to write bad reviews.
The market for software products is increasingly complex as developers reach new performance heights. It is vital to make sure your product keeps pace with the competition and operates at its best once it hits the market. Attention to product testing can help you accomplish your goal of constructing a quality product.
