How can Performance Testing help you win Digital wars?

Digital Testing is a growing concern for businesses that intend to leverage digital technologies for reaching out to their target group. Every business initiative works under tremendous pressure of deadlines that can be achieved with more automation and strategy. Performance and functional efficiency are at the core of every digital solution, which can be achieved with effective automation. Evolution from manual testing to automation testing is essential to especially confirm the performance of the software or application. So, why does it make sense for digital organizations to consider a well-structured Performance Testing strategy?

Performance Testing being a diagnostic process can help businesses to implement quintessential digital solutions at speed and with confidence. How can you trust your high grossing application to sustain through the competition if you are not sure about its performance? Performance Testing has to be a repetitive and rigorous process that can be effectively conducted with constant testing.

Automation is at the core of a successful Performance Testing strategy, and can be conducted by implementing tools that meet your core business objectives. You can leverage a licensed or an Open Source tool, but its choice, totally needs to be result-oriented and supports your business needs.

Why is Performance Testing essential?

Performance Testing with Automation is an essential and conscious decision that organizations take to not only achieve speed, but also ensure sustainability. You have built a super powerful gaming application that can run across devices and is targeted for online gamers. But have you checked its performance under varying network conditions or high user-traffic that can create unreasonable load on the application?

What if the application crashes during peak traffic conditions, or is unable to offer the promised experience? It can work effectively amongst few beta users, but what about real-life situations and unforeseen circumstances? What if the network conditions are not favourable? Performance Testing and Load Testing can help you get answers to these ‘anxiety-driven’ questions.

All these conditions have to be taken into account specifically while testing digital applications. A rigorous performance testing strategy and a team of skilled testers are needed to check for any defects or discrepancies with the business application. It enables businesses to develop software applications that are scalable and accessible under varying conditions, and most importantly, as per the changing consumer preferences.

Tool-driven Performance Testing helps to provide stakeholders with key details about the application’s speed, stability, and overall scalability during peak working hours. In general, developers and testers are able to gauge whether the application meets the speed requirements, and continues to stay stable and accessible even during unforeseen circumstances.

Why Performance Testing strategy is compelling for Digital Enterprises?

The business objectives for Digital Transformation are farfetched, which makes it highly critical for testers to ensure all the defending factors for growth. Performance is at the core of ensuring the expected customer experience. Let’s look at some key factors that makes Performance Testing indispensable for achieving success in the digital scenario.

Speed is basic, but essential!

If you are competing in the ecommerce segment, you cannot expect your application to go slow and ruin customer experience on a Big Sale Day. On any given day, a customer has enormous choices, but what about your business objectives. It would be disastrous to know that despite all the hard work and good promotional campaign the sale bombed. That too due to speed issues on your application and under unfavourable network conditions.

If we have to speak specifically about ecommerce, it is a highly competitive scenario. It involves multiple actions such as sharing, evaluating, comparing, buying, and exchanging, which taken place at a pace that must not get hindered. It’s all about delivering experience in real-time, and it is indispensable. Performance Testing or Load Testing tools are implemented to check for speed under varying traffic or network conditions. Performance at peak hours is highly critical for success in the digital space.

Validation for your application’s success

We have addressed various factors that form the basis of your performance testing goals – speed, scalability, availability, accessibility, and overall experience. Performance Testing helps you to evaluate your application against all these performance parameters and ensure compliance. As the application evolves in a consumer scenario, you can run tests for any of these factors during any point of time.

In an Agile set-up, the results can be evaluated by the client even during the development phase, which helps in making necessary changes to the application. In a way, Performance Testing provides the much needed validation for testers and developers to set their expectations from the application. Once these parameters are evaluated, they can confidently consider other factors. It further helps developers to create a baseline for proceeding with Regression Testing activities.

Achieving larger business objectives

Similar to any other testing activities, it is recommended that, Performance Testing strategy must be devised in sync with the business stakeholders. In this way, it helps the software ecosystem to fit into the overall business ecosystem. It is not just important to build a healthy software, it is critical to build an application that is scalable with the changing business needs.

In a digital scenario, Product Managers and QA folks need to answer similar question that are at the core of the business. For instance, who is the target group? What are the other competing applications or software platforms? How are the business statistics for other similar applications, and can those help us to get much more market-ready? How much is the estimated user-traffic that can be expected?

Performance Testing or Development cannot work in isolation. It has to be a collaborative effort alongside the business stakeholders.

In conclusion

You can devise a tool-agnostic strategy for your Performance Testing needs, but, it has to work in sync with your overall business needs. Applying business logic for building and developing consumer applications is very important. It helps to build a much better and convincing strategy for Performance or Load Testing.

Applying business logic will also support teams to dig deeper into the changing customer preferences and volatile business scenarios. What do you think?

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