1. Selection of wrong performance testing tools
2. Lack of proper test strategy & test coverage
3. Time and budget constraints
4. Lack of knowledge about need for performance tests
5. Improper analysis of performance test outcomes
6. Difficulty in conducting tests on production environment
7. Conclusion

Some of the common types of functional testing are Unit, Integration, System, Sanity, Smoke, Interface, Regression, Acceptance testing, etc. Some of the most common Non-functional testing types are Reliability, Endurance, Localization, Recovery, and Performance testing, to name a few.

Out of these testing types, Performance testing is one of the important testing process that plays a critical role by ensuring the software performs stably and seamlessly even under varying load conditions.

What is Performance Testing?

Performance or load testing is an important non-functional type of testing and involves the process by which software or an application is tested to know its current system performance.

This sort of testing checks how your current system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability when tested under varying workload conditions. Significantly, the system is tested under multiple and different load and network conditions and this testing process effectively checks the time taken by the system to respond under these different loads.

Performance testing also ensures that the application performs as expected, irrespective of the network fluctuations, bandwidth availability, or the load of traffic. Basically, this testing process determines the speed with which the system works, and some of the issues identified with this type of testing are runtime bloat, optimization issues related to speed, latency, throughput, poor response times, load balancing problems, and other bandwidth issues, if any.

There are various types of performance testing that are commonly adopted, which include Endurance testing, Load testing, Volume testing, Stress testing, Scalability testing, Spike testing, etc., and these testing methods determine the speed and responsiveness of the website, the app, or the network when tested under different workloads.

Why is Performance Testing Essential for Testing Business Websites and Mobile Apps?

Performance testing measures the speed, scalability, reliability, and stability of the software under varying loads, thus ensuring its stable performance. Every business application has to be stable and deliver consistent results, irrespective of the number of users accessing it at any point in time. Especially with respect to banking apps, eCommerce apps, etc., these apps need to perform seamlessly even with numerous users, or they adversely affect the brand reputation.

Today’s users prefer apps that load spontaneously and get enticed with these apps that perform seamlessly and deliver great user experience. If the apps deliver slow responses while accessing them, users tend to leave such apps and look for alternatives.

Evidently, today it is essential for businesses to ensure the performance of their business apps and websites is seamless in order to deliver great customer experience. Performance tests such as load and stress tests determine the behaviour of the application, and help to check whether the server responds to the user with requested data within the stipulated time.

Hence, it is essential for business websites and mobile apps to work effectively even under heavy load of users, as it is important for them to keep going to ensure business continuity. Therefore, Performance testing is critical for business success and should be leveraged by enterprises.

Performance Testing Process in Software Testing

Now, let us try to list different activities of the Performance testing to get an understanding of the actual Performance testing process listed below:

– Analyze the existing environment

– Gather performance characteristics of the current system

– Define usage model and load distribution

– Define the performance acceptance criteria

– Develop the test assets, test plan, test scripts and scenarios

– Configure the load generation environment

– Execute planned tests

– Monitor web servers, application servers and database server’s performance counters

– Correlate and analyze the results

– Generate reports

– Provide performance improvement recommendations

– Retest as needed

Specifically, the QA team is involved in the process of performance testing. The team needs to follow all the steps in order to perform this testing process and deliver effective results.

But, typically, while performing this method of performance testing or load testing, there are certain challenges which should be handled by the teams to ensure the success of the performance testing process.

Performance Testing in DevOps Pipelines

In a DevOps workflow, performance testing has to happen early and often. It’s no longer something you save for the end.

By integrating performance tests into CI tools like Jenkins or GitHub Actions, teams get quick feedback on how each build affects response time, resource usage, or stability. If something slows down the system, the build can be flagged immediately.

This method helps find problems before they get to production and makes sure that performance is always on your mind. It’s how teams today keep up their speed without losing quality.

Role of Machine Learning in Predictive Performance Testing

Machine Learning helps teams find performance problems before they get worse. It can find early warning flags by looking at patterns in old test data, such as memory use going up or reaction times increasing worse over time.

Instead of reacting after something breaks, teams can predict where trouble is coming and fix it in advance. This makes performance testing more proactive and less about scrambling after the fact.

It also helps cut through noise. Not every test result needs action. Machine Learning highlights what really matters so teams can focus on the issues that affect users most.

This kind of insight is especially useful in large systems where user behavior changes often, and patterns aren’t always obvious.

Open Source vs Commercial Performance Testing Tools

Choosing the right performance testing tool depends on your application, team skillset, and budget. Both open source and commercial tools have clear trade-offs.

Open source tools like JMeter, Gatling, and k6 are popular because they’re flexible and free to use. You can customize them to fit your needs, and they have active communities. But they often require more setup, scripting, and technical know-how.

Commercial tools like LoadRunner, Neotys, and BlazeMeter come with built-in support, easier reporting, and better integration with enterprise systems. They save time but come at a cost, which can be a blocker for smaller teams.

The key is to match the tool to your context. If you need deep customization and have the right technical resources, open source might work best. If you want faster onboarding, ready-made integrations, and vendor support, a commercial solution might save more time in the long run.

What are the Challenges of Performance Testing and How to Overcome Them?

1. Selection of wrong performance testing tools:

This is a common challenge, and in many situations, the most appropriate performance testing tool is not selected. This tool selection depends on a number of factors such as application communication protocol, application technology stack, skill level of the performance tester, and the licensing cost of the tool.

If a wrong tool is chosen, then it might lead to loss of testing days for getting the test scripts to work and it is necessary that the chosen performance tool should recognize the controls of the application under test.

Solution:

It is necessary for the QA manager and the QA team to properly evaluate the application under test (AUT) along with the licensing cost involved, and then choose the best performance testing tool to ensure the success of the testing process.

2. Lack of proper test strategy & test coverage:

There is a lot of effort involved in designing a comprehensive testing strategy which takes care of identifying and prioritizing project risks and deciding on what actions to be taken to mitigate them.

This testing process involves identifying application performance characteristics, planning appropriate tests to exercise those characteristics, simulating real user interactions, testing API services, and testing whether all these services are working or not as part of the test strategy. Due to the lack of proper brainstorming during the creation of the test strategy and test coverage, it becomes difficult to get effective performance test results.

Solution:

The performance team should spend significant effort on analysing and understanding application architecture and other performance characteristics like load distribution, usage model, geography of usage, availability requirements, resilience requirements, reliability requirements, technology stack etc.

A proper and clear testing strategy should be developed to ensure validation of these performance characteristics to get effective performance test results.

3. Time and budget constraints:

Load testing essentially takes some time and budget to get effective results. Due to the lack of proper planning during software development, allocation of resources or budget is not done. This leads to dependence on low-skilled resources, who do not understand full scope of performance testing activities.

It also might lead to usage of open source tools which might lead to increased project risk. All these factors impact the quality of overall performance testing process.

Solution:

Therefore, at the beginning of projects, it is essential for businesses to plan for proper performance testing activities accounting for required timeframe, resources and proper budget allocations.

4. Lack of knowledge about need for performance tests:

Most stakeholders and budget makers do not recognize the value of performance testing during software development. In most instances, post production release of software, many performance issues may crop up which might result in crashing of the website, app or software.

Solution:

Stakeholders, product owners, and test architects should integrate performance testing early on in their overall testing plan. This entails checking things like web servers, databases, and any third-party systems the app needs to work to make sure they all work well when there is a lot of traffic.

5. Improper analysis of performance test outcomes:

This is indeed a significant challenge faced by many testers, as a good amount of system and application knowledge is essential to deeply analyze the performance test results.

Solution:

An experienced performance tester should perform the testing process, who will be able to judge the scenarios, continuously refine the tests, and keep adding tests to make them consistent. The performance tester should be well aware of the application architecture.

Also, the performance tester should have experience across OS concepts, web architecture, the OSI model, networking concepts, data structures, client-side performance concepts, and server-side performance concepts. These performance experts will be able to quickly analyze the test results.

6. Difficulty in conducting tests on production environment:

Conducting load tests on a fully functioning production environment is a challenge. Especially while testing in such situations, real-time users are using the product, and any change to the production environment might affect the user experience.

Solution:

It is essential to closely monitor the trends in the production environment in order to spot out irregularities. The performance testing activities should ideally be planned in production like environment instead of actual production environment.

If business needs demand execution in actual production environment, such activities should be executed only during off business hours with sufficient time in hand for any corrective actions in case application crashes under load in production.

Earlier, load testing was mostly used to simulate basic user actions at a protocol level. But today, with more complex applications in place with intricate user actions, load testers might need to balance between automation and exploratory testing to handle these new, complex technology applications.

Performance Testing for Mobile and Web Applications and Key Metrics to Monitor

Mobile and web apps have different performance demands. Web applications are typically accessed through browsers on stable networks. The focus is on load times, rendering speed, and how well the app holds up under traffic from different browsers or screen sizes.

Mobile applications are more unpredictable. You have to test across various devices, operating systems, and network types. Things like background activity, battery usage, and network handoffs can impact performance. A mobile app might perform well on Wi-Fi but struggle on 3G or when switching between networks.

Because of these differences, the metrics you track during testing also shift slightly. That said, here are the core performance metrics every team should monitor, regardless of platform:

• Response time: How long does it take for the system to respond to a request?
• Throughput: The number of requests handled per second or minute.
• Error rate: Percentage of requests that fail due to timeouts, crashes, or other errors.
• Latency: Time delay between the request and the start of the response.
• Resource usage: How much CPU, memory, or bandwidth the app consumes.
• Concurrent users supported: The number of users the system can handle before slowing down or failing.

For mobile specifically, also consider:

• Battery drain under load
• Network switching impact
• App performance in background mode

Picking the correct metrics helps you figure out what your users care about most. Making sure that your approach fits the platform ensures that performance problems don’t go past your release.

Conclusion:

Performance testing is a non-functional type of testing that is performed to ascertain how the system performs under varying load conditions. The speed, scalability, reliability and resource usage of the software or the application is evaluated with this type of testing. It is essential for business websites especially eCommerce sites and mobile apps to get performance tested to ensure they scale up when numerous users access simultaneously.

There are many types of performance testing methods that can be adopted to test the software. But, typically, while performing this testing method, the QA teams tend to encounter certain challenges. Specifically, the QA teams need to follow certain measures to overcome the above-listed challenges and deliver stable and quality software.

Last but not the least, it is essential for businesses to leverage performance testing services provider to be assured of scalable, stable and high-performing software.

Talk to our software testing experts today to discuss your unique QA challenges and see how we bring value to your business.

The post Major Performance Testing Challenges and How to Overcome Them first appeared on TestingXperts.

1. Some Popular Incidents of Website Crashes During Black Fridays
2. The Real Cost of eCommerce Site Crashes on Black Friday
3. eCommerce Performance Testing for Black Friday
4. Conclusion
5. How can Tx help?

Last year’s Black Friday set new records for eCommerce, and 2023 shows no signs of slowing down. People are already planning for Christmas this year, the holiday shopping-inspired rush of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is approaching fast.

Millions of online shoppers look forward to visiting the eCommerce stores on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year to shop for the latest sale items. Customers search for the best deals while expecting a fun and frictionless shopping experience. Unprepared eCommerce stores with slow or crashing applications will, however, disappoint the buyers, who will eventually move to their competitor sites.

It’s a no-brainer; customers will choose the sites where the shopping experience is user-friendly and frictionless.

Some Popular Incidents of Website Crashes During Black Fridays

• Walmart and GameStop Corp. experienced website outages, site crashes, slow load time, and other performance issues during Cyber 5.

• Crew, the American multi-brand apparel and accessories retailer, lost $775,000 in sales and disappointed more than 323,000 shoppers in one holiday afternoon.

• GlassesUSA, the online retailer for prescription glasses, encountered 502 Bad Gateway server problems during CyberWeek and lost hefty site traffic.

• Costco faced losses worth $11 million as the website faced performance issues and went down for more than 16 Hrs.

The Real Cost of eCommerce Site Crashes on Black Friday

As seen in many reports and surveys, digital shopping is the future. It’s especially true during the holiday season when deal-hungry consumers rush to the online stores and fill their shopping carts. As the holiday season approaches, eCommerce businesses are concerned about their websites experiencing crashes and other performance issues.

Retailers have realized that Black Friday is no longer a single-day event. Customers seek great deals and discounts days in advance and wish them to last through the holiday season of Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, and Christmas.

When eCommerce sites are unprepared to handle the performance and load during peak hours, they look at irreparable damage to their businesses. Apart from the heavy revenue losses businesses face during such crashes, non-performing sites also lead to irreparable loss of brand credibility and customer loyalty.

eCommerce Performance Testing for Black Friday

eCommerce apps are complex platforms with multiple features like payment options, search options, cart, and product details. Each functionality should perform seamlessly to deliver the best user experience. This requires thorough eCommerce performance testing to evaluate whether the app can handle the sudden surge during the holiday season. Performance testing highlights the performance-related problems with the app long before the customers do. Here is how eCommerce apps should be tested for performance and scalability.

Perform speed and load testing:

eCommerce businesses should consider load tests to understand the estimated load handling capacity. A robust and effective load testing strategy should ensure that the website or the mobile application handles the anticipated load without crashing. Leveraging analytics from previous years’ traffic, it is recommended to estimate loads and run eCommerce performance testing accordingly. Critical user paths that should be tested include the login page, registration page, products, checkout, shopping carts, and similar pages.

Ensure the website is running seamlessly:

Mobile apps and web apps should be made to perform seamlessly and handle numerous transactions without any glitches. Retailers should see that their web and mobile apps are tested for both their functional and non-functional app components to ensure they deliver a great customer experience to provide seamless transactions across the value chain from adding to cart till the transaction, along with seamless gateway passage until check out.

Ensure safe and secure online transactions to customers:

With the rampant cyber-attacks continuing, eCommerce businesses should ensure their customers’ critical data is secure and safe and that no personal transaction data is exposed to any security attack. Security testing should be taken up to ensure these web apps and mobile apps are free from cyber threats, especially during the holiday season when online transactions are at an all-time high.

Ensure website accessibility:

eCommerce web apps should be accessible to specially-abled people. When testing for accessibility, the key areas to consider are color blindness, impaired vision, blindness, deafness, hearing impairment, motor impairment, etc. People with disabilities also want to shop online from the comfort of their homes, and accessibility testing ensures they, too, have a seamless shopping experience.

Ensure seamless customer experience (CX):

Identify the weak points in UI/UX and make the necessary updates to provide an intuitive interaction with the eCommerce app. eCommerce organizations should focus on the system’s ease of use and streamline critical features such as easy browsing, user-friendly navigation, handy catalog, and so on.

Ensure usability across website features:

Online retailers should ensure that the application is easy to use and that the users are able to find their products within a few clicks. The interface should be intuitive and not confuse users on finding the products from the list, making payments, etc. If the website’s interface is hard to use, the users might be convinced to look elsewhere.

Ensure mobile-readiness of apps:

Multiple devices or platforms may be involved throughout a customer’s buying journey. Customers may research their products on their smartphones and then place their orders on their iPad or other mobile devices. As a result, multi-device testing on eCommerce apps should be performed across various mobile devices, operating systems, and browsers to ensure a seamless sales transition from platform to platform.

Conclusion

Retailers and eCommerce businesses worldwide will try to make the most out of the upcoming holiday sales. But, to reap significant benefits from the shopping season, effective performance and holiday readiness of apps are important to meet the peak load requirements. Businesses must leverage eCommerce performance testing for high-performing, holiday-ready apps that do not hamper the sales flows while customers continue to buy the products online. Performance testing is crucial for any eCommerce business wishing to keep its credibility during the holiday season, maximize revenues, and keep customers happy. However, this complex process requires high levels of technical expertise and an understanding of performance testing tools, methodologies, and best practices.

TestingXperts (Tx) is a leading performance and load testing service provider for businesses across domains. Leverage next-gen testing services provider for end-to-end digital and performance testing of your systems to deliver a seamless shopping experience to your users this holiday season.

How can Tx help?

Prevent Black Friday Crashes by leveraging our performance testing accelerator Tx-PEARS.

Tx-PEARS:

It is an in-house developed robust framework that helps with all your non-functional testing requirements, including continuous monitoring of your infrastructure in production and lower environments. A consolidated platform to perform security, performance, and accessibility testing to deliver scalable, robust, reliable, and accessible apps to all. This tool can be leveraged to fine-tune your app’s performance effectively as it:

• Ensures to deliver quality products with effective non-functional testing services enabled through a single framework

• Provides actionable tuning recommendations to the development team which need to be implemented to get high app performance

• Provides detailed insights into the performance bottlenecks at the application server, web server, and database server level

• Helps improve the overall lifecycle of the identified performance issues

• Proides detailed reports to the clients and stakeholders to gather actionable insights

The post Boost your Black Friday Sales with eCommerce Performance Testing first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content

1. What is performance testing?
2. An overview of performance testing metrics
3. What is the need for performance testing metrics?
4. Important performance testing metrics
5. Performance testing metrics categories
6. Some important performance automation testing tools
7. Conclusion
8. How can we help businesses fine-tune apps/systems leveraging our performance testing accelerator Tx-PEARS?

What is performance testing?

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method used to check the speed, scalability, reliability, responsiveness, and performance of an app/website. Various performance testing methods include a spike, volume, endurance, stress, load, etc. These performance testing types help determine the app performance under fluctuating networks, varying user loads, varying bandwidths, etc. During performance testing, certain key performance indicators (KPIs), also known as performance testing metrics, are used to measure the effectiveness of this testing method. These KPIs define the effectiveness of the performance tests for businesses.

An overview of performance testing metrics

Performance testing metrics are the measures or parameters gathered during the performance and load testing processes. With the help of these metrics, performance test engineers or UAT teams determine the success of the performance testing process and further identify the critical areas in the software that needs more attention/improvement.

What is the need for performance testing metrics?

• Reflects current performance of the application, infrastructure, and network

•  Compares the test results and helps to analyze the impact of code changes

•  Determines the success of the overall performance testing process

•  Enables QA teams to make informed decisions and improve the quality of software

Important performance testing metrics

CPU utilization:

It is the percentage of CPU capacity utilized in processing the requests.

Memory utilization:

This metric measures the utilization of the primary memory of the computer while processing any work requests.

Response times:

It is the total time between sending the request and receiving the response. Better the response time, better the performance of website/application.

Average load time:

This metric measures the time taken by a webpage to complete the loading process and appear on the user screen.

Throughput:

It measures the number of transactions an application can handle in a second, or in other words, it is the rate at which a network or computer receives the requests per second.

Average latency/Wait time:

It is the time spent by a request in a queue before getting processed.

Bandwidth:

It is the measurement of the volume of data transferred per second.

Requests per second:

This metric refers to the number of requests handled by the application per second.

Error rate:

It is the percentage of requests resulting in errors compared to the total number of requests.

Transactions Passed/Failed:

It is the percentage of passed/failed transactions against the total number of transactions.

Performance testing metrics categories

1. Client-side performance testing metrics:

During performance testing, QA teams evaluate the client-side performance of the software. It includes the evaluation of end-to-end test scenarios and the apt rendering of front-end elements like CSS and JavaScript files. These client-side performance testing metrics help evaluate the application response for different clients using various devices (desktop, mobile, etc.) and servers. Some of the common client-side performance testing metrics are:

Most commonly used client-side performance testing tools:

2. Server-side performance testing metrics:

The performance of the server directly affects the performance of an application. Therefore, it is essential to measure the performance of servers leveraging server performance monitoring metrics. Some of the key server performance monitoring metrics are:

Most commonly used server-side performance monitoring tools:

Some important performance automation testing tools

JMeter:

It is an open-source performance and load testing tool used to measure the performance of applications and software. JMeter simulates a heavy load on the server and creates multiple simultaneous virtual users on a webserver to enable effective load testing. It can be used to effectively track, interpret, and analyze the performance testing results. Some of the key metrics of JMeter are Elapsed Time, Latency, Connect Time, Median, 90% Line (90^th Percentile), Standard Deviation, Thread Name, Throughput, etc.

LoadView:

It is an easy-to-use performance testing tool and provides insights into vital performance testing metrics for organizations. LoadView allows the user to view test execution in real-time to see a graphical representation of the execution plan, average response times, and errors. It provides detailed level statics, including key performance testing metrics such as maximum, actual, and expected number of virtual users, the average response time of transactions, number of sessions, session errors, load injector CPU usage, DNS Time, Connect Time, SSL Time, etc.

LoadNinja:

It is a cloud-based load testing and performance testing platform. LoadNinja produces intelligent and accurate data that helps analyze the performance of websites, web applications, and APIs in real-time using accurate browser-based metrics. Some of the key metrics of LoadNinja include Virtual users, 90^th Percentile Duration, 95^th Percentile Duration, Standard Deviations, Total Iterations, Total Timeouts, Total Page errors, etc.

Conclusion

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method used to check software’s speed, scalability, reliability, and responsiveness. For businesses to know the effectiveness of performance testing within the enterprise, certain performance testing metrics should be known. These metrics help determine the success and the progress of the performance testing process. Typically, effective tracking of performance testing metrics helps improve the software’s performance and quality. Leverage performance testing from a next-gen QA and independent software testing company for effective performance and load testing services and get high-performing, high-quality, scalable, and robust software.

How can we help businesses fine-tune apps/systems leveraging our performance testing accelerator Tx-PEARS?

Tx-PEARS:

It is an in-house developed robust framework that helps with all your non-functional testing requirements, including continuous monitoring of your infrastructure in production and in lower environments. A consolidated platform to perform security, performance, and accessibility testing to deliver scalable, robust, reliable, and accessible apps to all

This tool can be leveraged to fine-tune your app’s performance effectively:

•  Ensures to deliver quality products with effective non-functional testing services enabled through a single framework

•  It provides actionable tuning recommendations to the development team which need to be implemented to get high app performance

•  Through Tx- PEARS, detailed insights into the performance bottlenecks at the application server, web server, and database server level are identified

•  Through Tx-Pears overall lifecycle of the identified performance issues can be improved

•  Detailed reports are delivered to the clients and stakeholders to gather actionable insights

The post Performance Testing Metrics – A Detailed Guide for Businesses first appeared on TestingXperts.

“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of the business.” -Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft.

It seems like the above statement is turning into an unexpected reality with time. Due to the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic, businesses across the world have started shifting online. Though this sudden shift helped businesses to survive, it increased the level of competition among companies. And now, with the holiday season 2021 fast approaching, the competition among businesses is expected to grow more intense.

This year, the holiday shopping season, especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is likely to be different and bigger than all previous years. Thus, for businesses to reap significant benefits from the holiday season 2021 and deliver a great shopping experience to customers, the holiday readiness of apps is critical.

Table of Content:

1. Top Predictions for the Holiday Season 2024
2. Common Challenges faced by Businesses During Holiday Sales 2023?
3. “Role of Performance Testing for Holiday Readiness of Apps
4. Stats Depicting the Criticality of Performance Testing for Holiday Season
5. Major App Functionalities that need Effective Performance Testing
6. Performance Testing Types Businesses must Leverage for Holiday Readiness of Apps
7. 8 Key Performance Testing Metrics for Business Apps
8. Conclusion
9. How can TestingXperts (Tx) help?

Top Predictions for the Holiday Season 2024

The holiday season will start early: Keeping in view the trends of last year’s holiday season, which started early during mid-October 2020. It is expected that this year, the same trend will be followed, and businesses are expected to roll out early Black-Friday deals and offers.

M-commerce is expected to rise even more: Since mobile apps have become an inseparable part of human lives, this year, it is expected that more shoppers will prefer to use mobile apps for shopping. Thus, businesses need to ensure their mobile eCommerce apps and websites are ready for high user-load.

No more cookies and ad-tracking: According to Forbes, In March 2021, Google and Apple confirmed plans to end third-party cookies that track user movements across websites. It means that the only way left for online businesses to gain customer attention is by ensuring a great first impression on customers. Thus, businesses must ensure their eCommerce apps and websites load fast and perform well under all circumstances to deliver a great customer experience (CX).

Common Challenges faced by Businesses During Holiday Sales 2023?

Undoubtedly, last year’s holiday season was a huge success. According to Salesforce, global online sales during Cyber Week 2020 hit a new record with $270 billion, which was 36% higher as compared to the year 2019. The major driver behind this unexpected rise was the change in customers’ shopping behaviour due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the reduced in-store holiday hours, consumers preferred online shopping during the cyber week that pushed digital sales to new heights.

However, various challenges were faced by businesses during the holiday sales 2020, which negatively affected their revenues, brand image, and customer shopping experience.

• Issues with mobile app performance, such as frequent app crashes, server time-outs, delayed response etc.

• Failure to provide a high-performing and secure interface for online shoppers

• Slow app loading due to heavy user load

• Difficulty in maintaining responsiveness of eCommerce websites

• Challenges in ensuring 24/7 uptime for POS applications

• Delay in processing payments

Role of Performance Testing for Holiday Readiness of Apps

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing type that evaluates the performance of apps under various conditions, such as varying bandwidth, increased user load, fluctuating networks, etc. The main aim of this test is to remove performance-related bottlenecks from apps. Therefore, by leveraging this non-functional software testing type, businesses can overcome the above-mentioned challenges and get the effective performance of apps during peak load days such as the festive season and holiday season.

There are various benefits that businesses can reap by leveraging this non-functional software testing type.

Increases responsiveness of apps:

It is always preferred that if the responsiveness of apps is good, it ensures excellent user engagement. To ensure the high responsiveness of apps, performance testing is essential.

Improves loading time:

Slow-loading websites usually annoy the customer, and they lose interest. Performance testing helps to improve the loading time taken by applications or websites.

Provides higher stability:

Apps should not crash when the user load increases to ensure a great use experience (UX). Therefore, load testing should be taken up to improve the stability of the apps.

Stats Depicting the Criticality of Performance Testing for Holiday Season

• According to a Deloitte Digital report titled, ‘Milliseconds make Millions’, a 0.1s improvement in site speed results in an 8.4% increase in conversions for retail consumers, a 9.2% increase in the average order value, and a 5.2% increase in retail customer engagement.

• According to an article titled, ‘Shopping for speed on eBay.com’, for every 100 milliseconds improvement in search page loading time, eBay saw a 0.5% increase in the “Add to Cart” count.

• According to news published by com<, Costco’s website went down for more than 16 hours during Thanksgiving Day, costing the retailer nearly $11 million in lost pre-Black Friday potential sales.

• Another evidence of a website crash is PetSmart, which sells pet products, services, and small pets in the US. PetSmart faced an issue with its website during Black Friday 2020. The company tweeted the issue on Twitter and apologized to customers for the inconvenience.

Undoubtedly, performance testing has significantly helped businesses across the world improve the performance of their apps/websites. However, certain areas must be tested thoroughly to ensure seamless, performance of apps/websites.

Major App Functionalities that need Effective Performance Testing

Critical user paths:

An eCommerce app has various critical user paths, such as registration, login, product page, shopping cart, checkout, etc., that must be tested to identify and remove performance bottlenecks.

Payment gateway:

Delays in processing payments or failed payments hamper the CX. It is essential to test the payment gateway to ensure successful payment transactions during peak load days.

Back-end integrations:

For an eCommerce app to work properly, its front-end and back-end systems must work in harmony. Back-end integration such as CRM and logistics must be load tested to ensure proper functioning on peak user-load days.

Communication mediums:

Email, SMS, and other communication mediums play an important role in keeping the customer engaged and updated. Thus, it is essential to load test these mediums for their seamless performance under increased user-loads.

Performance Testing Types Businesses must Leverage for Holiday Readiness of Apps

Load testing:

This testing method is performed to check how the system performs under normal (usually around 70% of peak load) and peak user load conditions.

Stress testing:

This testing method helps identify the system’s breaking point when subjected to a user load beyond the expected peak load. The breaking point can be defined as a load at which either the response time degrades beyond 10% or transactions start falling by more than 5%.

Endurance testing:

This testing method checks the stability and responsiveness of the system when it is under significant load (around 70% of peak load) for a longer period (usually 8 hours to 72 hours).

Spike testing:

It is a subset of stress testing and checks the behaviour of the system by suddenly varying the number of users. It checks if the system can handle the increased user load or not.

Volume testing:

In this testing type, multiple data-intensive transactions are performed to validate how the system performs under such data volumes.

Scalability testing:

This test is performed to measure the capability of software to scale up or scale out when additional resources are added to it.

8 Key Performance Testing Metrics for Business Apps

App installation time:

This gives the first impression of an app to the user. Thus, it is essential to have a faster installation time for the app to make a great impression.

App launch time:

App launch time or app start time is another important metric that must be checked in an application. Ideally, it should not take more than 1 to 2 seconds for the first screen to appear.

App background processing:

It is essential to ensure that in-app performance remains unaffected when multiple apps run in parallel. When the app runs in the background and is retrieved, no data loss should happen.

Memory usage:

An app should not consume excess memory and must not heat the device, especially when it runs in the background. Thus, it is essential to check an app’s CPU usage and memory during its execution.

Response time:

It is the amount of time taken by an app to respond to a given input. Faster response time ensures less wait time and high performance of the app.

Average load time:

Load time of app/website and page load time are both extremely important for users and businesses. Faster loading time or speed ensures better performance of the app/website.

Bandwidth and network compatibility:

Varying bandwidth and fluctuating networks affect the app loading time. Thus, to ensure effective app performance, it is essential to load test the app with minimal bandwidth and with different network types and connections such as 3G, 4G, and 5G.

User Geography:

An app should ideally work seamlessly across geographies. Thus, it is essential to conduct geo-load testing to ensure effective apps performance across different regions.

Conclusion

This year 2021, the holiday season will be a more significant event. Retailers and eCommerce businesses from all over the world will come together and will try to make the most out of the holiday sales. But, for businesses to reap significant benefits from the upcoming holiday shopping season, effective performance and holiday readiness of apps and business websites are essential. Businesses must leverage performance testing for high-performing, holiday-ready apps from a next-gen QA and independent software testing services provider.

How can TestingXperts (Tx) help?

TestingXperts (Tx) is a leading provider of performance and load testing services for businesses across domains. Tx has experience with all industry-leading performance testing and monitoring tools, along with expertise in end-to-end application performance testing services, including network, database, hardware, etc. With a highly-skilled team of performance testers, Tx helps businesses benchmark their application performance. Tx provides customized test results reports to clients that help them make informed decisions. Tx’s in-house accelerator Tx-Perfkit can be leveraged to achieve faster performance testing outcomes.

The post Significance of Performance Testing in Ensuring Holiday Readiness of Apps first appeared on TestingXperts.

1. What is the importance of application performance for businesses
2. Performance Testing Overview
3. Benefits for Businesses Leveraging Performance Testing
4. Why is Performance Testing Required?
5. Need for high-performing apps across some major industries
6. Different Performance Testing Types Businesses should leverage
7. Conclusion
8. How can TestingXperts (Tx) help?

What is the importance of application performance for businesses?

With the rapidly changing customer expectations across the business landscape, the need for high-performing apps is growing in the market. Today, every business needs apps that perform seamlessly to attract new customers and retain existing users. Also, today’s customers expect companies to deliver apps that load fast and perform seamlessly even under peak loads to provide a great Customer Experience (CX).

Typically, businesses need apps that perform flawlessly under various conditions such as fluctuating networks, low bandwidths, high user loads, etc. For example, If a mobile application performance does not meet the user expectations, users are likely to abandon that app and switch to the nearest competitor. Invariably, the application or website or the web app performance plays a significant role. Therefore, to ensure that the apps perform seamlessly under all conditions, businesses must deliver a seamless user experience.

Performance Testing Overview

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method that validates the app’s speed, responsiveness, scalability, and reliability. This load testing method checks if the application performs seamlessly under varying networks, bandwidths, and under varying user loads. Some of the app issues identified with this type of testing are runtime error, optimization issues related to speed, latency, throughput, response times, load balancing, etc.

Why is Performance Testing Required?

Latest research analysts views on the need for high-performing apps

According to Statista, there are almost 3.5 million apps available on the Google Play Store and nearly 2.2 million apps available for iOS as of the second quarter of 2022. The report also states that only the best-performing apps stand out in the market and will attract customers.

Think with Google, a one-stop shop of Google for understanding industry trends, in one of its blogs on ‘Speed is key: Optimize your Mobile Experience,’ states that 29% of smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app if the app is slow or doesn’t satisfy their needs.

According to a Pinterest Engineering Blog titled ‘Driving User Growth with Performance Improvements,’ it has been stated that Pinterest engineers ran an experiment in which they rebuilt web pages for performance. As a result, it led to a 40 percent decrease in Pinner wait time, a 15 per cent increase in SEO traffic, and a 15 per cent increase in conversion rate to new signups.

The above statistics showcase how critical the performance of mobile & web app or website is for businesses. Let us further understand the significance and the need of application performance across some major industries.

Benefits for Businesses Leveraging Performance Testing

1. Improves response time:

Response time is the total time taken by the software to generate an output against the input received. Typically, this testing method helps to improve the app’s response time by removing performance-related issues from the software.

2. Enhances the load time:

It is known that slow-loading websites annoy customers, and similar is the case with mobile apps having more load time, users either abandon the app or move to the nearest competitor. Typically, this testing method improves the loading time of applications by identifying and removing performance and load-related issues or bugs from the software.

3. Improves scalability:

The scalability of an app refers to its capacity to handle varying user loads seamlessly. This test helps in enhancing the load handling capacity of apps by testing the apps and websites under varying user loads.

4. Eliminates bottlenecks:

Bottlenecks are the barriers that decrease the responsiveness of the entire system. This performance testing method helps to find performance bottlenecks in the software by identifying the areas that cause the problems and helps to fix them by notifying the dev team promptly.

5. Helps in early identification and fixing of defects:

Performance testing allows testers to detect and fix performance-related issues faster and frequently. It enables testers to quickly identify issues and helps in faster resolution of bugs.

6. Speeds up the testing process:

In the earlier software development models like the waterfall model, the testers had to wait for the development process to get over to start the software testing. But in an agile environment, performance testing is integrated along with the development process, which speeds up the overall software testing process. Typically, a shift-left method of testing is followed in parallel to development which ensures faster results.

7. Enhances Customer Experience (CX):

Performance testing ensures delivery of high-quality products to customers in less time. Faster delivery of quality products enhances CX and makes the stakeholders and customers happy.

Need for high-performing apps across some major industries

Enterprises across industries require their websites, web apps & mobile apps to perform seamlessly 24×7, and each of the industry segments, as given below, states the significance for app performance.

Healthcare:

• Healthcare apps bridge the gap between healthcare service providers, doctors, patients, and third-party service providers.

• Healthcare apps help patients book appointments with doctors, get real-time consultation with physicians, view and maintain health records, purchase medicines via telepharmacy apps, telemedicine apps, etc.

• According to Grand View Research, the global mHealth apps market size was valued at USD 40.05 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.7% from 2021 to 2028. The major forces driving the growth of mHealth applications in the healthcare sector are better treatment outcomes and improved patient lifestyles enabled by these apps.

• Invariably, It is essential to ensure that the healthcare apps should perform seamlessly under all network conditions and workloads to deliver a great CX to its users.

Telecom:

• Telecom apps enable the flow of communication and information sharing via various platforms such as telephony, video conferencing, broadcasting, television media, instant messaging, e-mails, etc.

• Various types of telecom apps such as retailer apps, mobile wallets, CRM apps, customer support apps, etc., help businesses and customers to interact, share information, perform transactions, etc., with just a click of the button.

• According to Grand View Research, the global telecom services market size was valued at USD 1,657.7 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 5.4% from 2021 to 2028.

• Telecom companies must ensure their apps load fast, perform seamlessly under varying user loads and fluctuating network conditions to deliver a great CX and protect brand image.

eCommerce:

• Today, eCommerce apps continue to dominate the retail and shopping sector as it allows end-users to view and shop products on the go.

• eCommerce apps allow users to perform various tasks such as viewing products, adding products to cart/wish list, removing products from cart/wish list, paying the amount via EMI, Wallet, UPI, COD, etc.

• According to Statista the eCommerce software application market had an estimated value of around 5.1 U.S. dollars in 2018 and is forecasted to grow to approximately 6.3 billion U.S. dollars by 2023 during the forecast period of 2019-2024.

• eCommerce app providers should ensure that their apps perform seamlessly during peak days holiday sales like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, etc. These business-critical apps should perform as expected under all networks and user loads to deliver a great shopping experience to customers.

BFSI/FinTech:

• Banking and finance apps have become a part of human lives, as these apps allow users to perform transactions with a single click.

• Banking apps have made customer’s lives easy as users can now pay bills, transfer money, book tickets, buy policies, etc., on the go.

• According to Mordor Intelligence, the financial services application market was valued at USD 103.99 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 164.01 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 7.89% over the forecast period 2020–2025.

• Banking apps should deliver expected performance under peak hours to eliminate chances of a server crash, app crash, stuck payments, etc. High-performing banking apps help businesses to deliver a seamless online banking experience to customers.

EdTech:

• EdTech apps have gained a lot of importance, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. EdTech apps help teachers, students, and others to connect online.

• EdTech apps help teachers provide virtual education to students and allow students to attend online classes, watch videos, and write exams virtually.

• According to MarketsandMarkets, the global EdTech and smart classroom market size is expected to grow from USD 85.8 billion in 2020 to USD 181.3 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 16.1% during the forecast period of 2020-2025.

• The EdTech apps should perform seamlessly 24/7 under all conditions to ensure great learning and teaching experience for both students and teachers.

Across industries, businesses need scalable, robust, and high-performing apps to deliver a great CX. Hence, businesses should leverage different performance testing types to get seamless apps.

Different Performance Testing Types Businesses should leverage

1. Load testing:

This testing method evaluates the potential of an application to work under varying user loads. It is conducted to remove any performance bottlenecks from the system.

2. Stress testing:

It identifies the breaking point of the software when it is subjected to a user load beyond the expected peak. This testing method verifies the stability & reliability of software applications and measures their robustness and error handling capabilities under extremely heavy load conditions. It also ensures software does not crash under varying conditions.

3. Endurance testing:

It checks the system’s performance when it is under significant load (around 70% of peak load) for a longer period (usually 8 hours to 72 hours). This testing method helps in improving the performance, stability, and reliability of the app.

4. Spike testing:

It is a subset of stress testing and checks the performance of the software by suddenly varying the no. of users. This testing method also checks if the software can handle fluctuating user loads under varying conditions.

5. Volume testing:

In this testing, the data load of the software is increased, and its performance is then checked. It helps in providing the volume of data that can be handled by particular software.

6. Scalability testing:

This test identifies the actual number of users that the system can support with existing hardware capacity.

7. Baseline testing:

Each time the software application is updated, performance testing is performed, and baseline metrics of the software application are recorded. These baseline metrics are compared with the results of previously recorded performance metrics. This testing method helps businesses to ensure that a consistent quality of the software is maintained.

8. Benchmark testing:

This testing method compares performance testing results against performance metrics based on different industry standards. This software testing method helps businesses ensure that the software’s current and future releases meet high-quality standards.

Conclusion

With the growing business competition and intricate application architecture, the need for high-quality and optimally performing apps is rising in the market. Though millions of apps are available, only the high-performing apps attract the customer and survive the competition. It is a known truth that low-performing apps affect the brand’s reputation and customer experience. Therefore, businesses should leverage performance testing to ensure their critical apps are of high quality and perform seamlessly to deliver a great CX.

How can TestingXperts (Tx) help?

TestingXperts (Tx) helps businesses predict application behaviour and benchmark application performance. Tx ensures the application is responsive, reliable, robust, scalable, and also meets all contractual obligations and SLAs for performance. Tx offers performance and load testing services across domains and technologies, including web-based n-tier applications, client-server applications, SOA-based solutions, or COTS solutions.

We have rich experience in all industry-leading performance testing and monitoring tools, along with expertise in end-to-end application performance testing, including network, database, hardware, etc. We publish a detailed performance testing report for the application with response times, break-point, peak load, memory leaks, resource utilization, uptime, etc. Get in touch with our performance testing experts to know more.

The post Role of Performance Testing for Businesses Across Industries first appeared on TestingXperts.

Every business needs high-performing and seamless applications (mobile & web) to increase user engagement and deliver a great customer experience (CX). Today, businesses continue to embrace DevOps to get faster releases and high-quality software that embeds continuous integration, continuous testing, and delivery. The DevOps continuous testing involves functional, performance, security, and other testing methods to ensure flawless, high-quality apps. Specifically, performance testing plays a critical role in improving the scalability, reliability, and robustness of the apps before they are released into the market.

Table of Contents

1. Software Performance Testing
2. Some of the Use cases of Performance testing
3. Benefits of performance testing
4. Various types of Performance Testing
5. An overview of performance testing in DevOps
6. Performance testing in DevOps CI/CD pipeline
7. Performance testing process overview
8. Performance testing metrics to measure mobile app performance
9. How is performance testing important for data migration and ETL testing?
10. Significance of think time in performance testing
11. An overview of automated performance testing tools
12. Conclusion

Software Performance Testing

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method performed to check the software’s speed, responsiveness, scalability, stability, and reliability. The primary aim of this testing method is to remove performance bottlenecks from the app/software and ensure seamless performance under all conditions such as varying user loads, fluctuating networks, varying network bandwidths, etc.

Some of the Use cases of Performance testing

• Checking app performance by simultaneously running multiple applications in the background

• Verifying app performance when multiple users login at the same time

• Checking app performance by suddenly increasing/decreasing user load

• Checking app performance under various types of networks, such as Wi-Fi, LAN, 3G, 4G, etc.

• Checking app responsiveness by taking into consideration the app response to user queries

Benefits of performance testing

1. Improves website speed:

Common issues like broken images, content-related issues, frequent timeouts, etc., hamper the website speed. This non-functional testing method helps identify and resolve these issues, thus enhancing the website speed.

2. Removes performance bottlenecks from apps:

This software performance testing ensures the removal of critical bugs and performance bottlenecks from the software before it goes live.

3. Ensures scalability, reliability, and robustness of apps:

This testing type ensures that the software is scalable and can handle users even during peak loads. It ensures that the software performs well under unexpected situations like fluctuating networks, bandwidths, user load, etc. Thus, it ensures the software’s scalability, reliability, and robustness.

4. Enhances customer experience (CX):

End-users don’t prefer slow-loading apps and websites. This testing method helps in improving the app’s performance and speed, which ultimately enhances the CX.

5. Helps to generate more revenue:

It is known that end-users prefer apps with seamless performance. Better app performance will generate more revenue for businesses as users prefer to download such seamless apps, especially for eCommerce, telecom, and healthcare sector apps.

Various types of Performance Testing

1. Load Testing:

Testers perform this testing by simulating the number of virtual users that might use the application. The principal aim of this testing method is to ensure that the application performs well under normal and peak user loads.

2. Stress Testing:

This testing technique helps identify the system’s breaking point when user load is increased beyond the expected peak.

3. Endurance Testing:

This testing helps identify any resource leakage in the system, while it is subjected to normal user load for an extended duration like 8 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, or 48 hours, etc.

4. Spike Testing:

It is a subset of stress testing and checks the system’s behavior by suddenly varying the no. of users. This testing checks if the system can handle the variations in user load.

5. Volume Testing:

In this testing method, multiple data-intensive transactions are performed to validate how the system performs under such data volumes.

6. Scalability Testing:

This testing method determines the capability of the system to scale up in terms of user load, data volume, number of transactions, etc. The main aim of this testing method is to determine the peak point beyond which the system prevents more scaling.

7. Component-level performance testing:

An application comprises minor components that are the smallest parts of an application. In component-level performance testing, the individual components of the application are tested to ensure the effective performance of components in isolation. Later, all the app components are tested as a group to ensure a high-performing and fully integrated application. Further, these components are integrated, and finally, performance testing is executed after integration.

An overview of performance testing in DevOps

Businesses continue to embrace DevOps to get faster releases and high-quality in less time. This DevOps methodology promotes collaboration between teams to deliver faster and quality releases to the customer. The DevOps lifecycle includes various stages such as Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD). Typically, to ensure the release of high-quality software in less time, performance testing in DevOps plays a critical role. Moreover, performance testing in DevOps is done by integrating continuous and automated performance testing in the continuous delivery pipeline. However, to take up performance and load testing in DevOps, a series of steps should be followed at each stage of the DevOps lifecycle.

Performance testing in DevOps CI/CD pipeline

Performance testing in DevOps involves continuous performance evaluation at each DevOps CI/CD pipeline stage and ensures faster feedback loops for software improvement. 

1. Code and build stage:

DevOps performance testing starts with continuous performance testing at the build stage, which involves unit performance testing. In this stage, the smallest unit of the software is checked to ensure they perform well in isolation.

2. Integration stage:

Once the unit performance testing is done, performance testing is done at the integration stage, where the smallest units of the software are integrated. The performance of these integrated units/modules is tested to ensure the effective performance of modules after integration.

3. Test stage:

During this stage, system-level performance testing is done to ensure the software performs well as expected. Once the system-level performance tests are passed, the software moves to the release and deploy stage.

4. Release and deploy stage:

During this stage, load testing and real user monitoring are performed to ensure that the software handles the user load effectively in the production environment.

5. Monitoring stage:

After the software reaches the monitoring stage, continuous performance monitoring is done, where various performance metrics are evaluated to determine areas that need improvement.

Performance testing process overview

1. Prepare performance testing checklist:

Testers should prepare a checklist before starting the test. Performance testing checklist includes what is to be tested, pass/fail criteria, user scenarios, issues to be monitored, etc. While preparing the checklist, testers need to gather the client’s requirements. 

2. Plan the test:

Prepare a test plan or test strategy which covers the aim and scope of testing, application architecture, environment details, testing tools, roles, responsibilities, etc.

3. Setup the test environment:

Testers need to set up the test environment. There are two types of test environments, on-premise, and on-cloud. The test environment should be chosen wisely, as the effectiveness of the testing process largely depends on the environment in which it is executed. Load generation environment should be configured to generate virtual load for load testing of the software.

4. Prepare test data:

To set up the test data, testers need to first extract test data, modify the data for testing the software, and generate enough test data to perform the tests.

5. Prepare test scripts, execute the test and analyze the results:

This is an important step that involves preparation of test scripts, execution of test cases, and analysis of test results to know whether it is pass or fail.

6. Fix the bugs:

The Dev team resolves all the bugs found during the testing process. Once all the bugs are fixed, the testing process is repeated to ensure defects are fixed.

7. Prepare test report:

Document all the test findings in one place and share the test report with all the stakeholders and project team.

Performance testing metrics to measure mobile app performance

1. App installation time:

This metric gives the user a first impression of the app. This metric measures the app installation time and how it can be improved.

2. App launch time:

App launch time or app start time is another important metric that must be checked in an application. Ideally, it should not be more than 1 to 2 seconds.

3. App background processing:

It is essential to ensure that app performance remains unaffected when multiple apps run parallelly. It is essential to ensure that no data loss should happen when the app runs in the background and is retrieved.

4. Client-side resource usage:

An app should not consume excess memory and must not heat the device, especially when it runs in the background. Thus, checking an app’s CPU usage and memory during its execution is essential.

5. Response time:

This metric measures the time is taken by an app to respond to a given input. Faster response time ensures less wait time and high performance of the app.

6. Average load time:

Load time of app/website and page load time is very important for users and businesses. Faster loading time or speed ensures better performance of an app.

7. Bandwidth and network compatibility:

Varying bandwidth and fluctuating networks affect the app loading time. However, to ensure effective app performance, it is essential to perform load testing of an app with minimal bandwidth and different network types and connections such as 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-FI, etc.

8. Concurrent users:

This metric measures how many virtual users are active or accessing the app at a given point in time. The number of users using the app directly impacts the app’s performance.

9. Requests per second:

It is the measure of how many requests by second the server can handle without degrading performance or resulting in error.

How is performance testing important for data migration and ETL testing?

Data migration is a complex but essential process for every business. Effective data migration helps businesses ensure better data availability, reduced cost, improved performance, and more. However, while migrating data from various sources to a new system, it is essential to ensure that the new system’s performance remains unaffected after migration. This is where the need for performance testing during data migration comes into the picture. In this testing type, various performance tests are executed on the system before and after migration to ensure the new system’s performance is not degraded post-migration.

Performance and load testing play a vital role in the Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) process. The data is extracted from various sources during the ETL process, transformed into a consistent data type, and then loaded into the data warehouse or target system. Performance testing in ETL is done to ensure that the ETL system can handle a high volume of transactions. Performance tests in ETL also verify the efficiency of the ETL system by determining the actual time taken by the system to process data. The lesser the data processing time, the higher is the efficiency.

Significance of think time in performance testing

Think time is the time difference between each action performed by the user. When users visit a website, they take some time to think and take action. The difference or the time gap between each action performed by the user is known as think time.

For example, suppose a user visits an eCommerce website. The user clicks on the products tab, selects the product, reads the description, and adds the product to the cart. The time spent between clicking on the product tab to clicking on the add to cart tab is considered think time.

Think time plays a very crucial role, as it represents the user’s actual behavior in the system. A user never does all actions like login, search product, add to cart, payment, log out in one go. The users take some time to complete all actions. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce think time in this non-functional software testing technique to create a real-world scenario in the testing environment.

Another reason to introduce think time in performance and load testing is that suppose if a tester executes software testing giving multiple requests with no pause, it will fail the server. The server also needs time to process requests and give the result. Therefore, it is essential to consider think time in performance and load testing.

An overview of automated performance testing tools

1. Apache JMeter:

It is an open-source tool that helps to analyze and measure the performance of a range of web applications. This tool supports various protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, XML, SOAP, Java-based protocols, etc. This non-functional software testing tool requires less scripting effort as compared to other tools and has simple charts/graphs that can be used for analyzing key load-related statistics and resource usage.

2. WebLOAD:

It is an enterprise-scale load testing tool that is used for web and mobile load testing. This tool comes with a good number of features and functionalities, such as Load Generation Console, Analytics Dashboard, and comprehensive IDE.

3. Stress Stimulus:

This tool is used to perform load testing of web apps, mobile apps, and enterprise apps. Stress stimulus supports on-premise or cloud load testing and works well with Fiddler. This tool comes with an end-to-end test wizard that eases the performance testing of mobile and web apps.

4. io:

It is a multiplatform performance and load testing tool. This tool allows adding performance testing into the continuous integration process, real-time monitoring of the test environment, and analyzing test results on multiple machines.

5. NeoLoad:

It is a continuous performance testing tool for desktop and mobile apps. This tool comes with great features like scriptless test creation, GUI-driven design, automated parameterization, etc. Neoload can be easily integrated with CI tools, and it allows real-time identification and removal of performance bottlenecks.

6. Load Runner:

It is the most widely used tool to test applications and measure system behavior and performance under varying loads. This tool is used to simulate thousands of concurrent users and record the variations in the system performance. This testing tool supports all advanced technologies like Ajax, Flex, HTML5.0, Java, SOAP, Citrix, along with all other legacy technologies.

7. LoadView:

It is used for cloud-based load testing, and it helps DevOps teams to test websites, web apps, and application programming interfaces (APIs) with thousands of concurrent users. This tool simulates API calls, validates API responses, and verifies the most important SLA requirements. The agile and DevOps teams can test their website’s UX under load, verify performance and identify various bottlenecks within the applications.

Conclusion

Performance testing is an essential element that determines the success of an application in DevOps processes. A high-performing app is the need of the hour for businesses and the low performance of the app can affect the brand reputation and even the CX. Hence, a well-developed performance testing method and proper automated tools should be leveraged to get high-performing and scalable apps. Therefore, enterprises should leverage next-gen end-to-end performance testing from a specialized QA and independent software testing services provider to ensure high-performing software and accelerate time to market.

The post How to Do Performance Testing in DevOps? first appeared on TestingXperts.

1. 1. An overview of cloud performance testing
   2. What are the Key Focus Areas in Cloud Performance Testing?
   3. Cloud Performance Testing or In-house Testing?
   4. Seven business benefits of cloud performance testing
   5. Types of cloud performance testing
   6. Six best practices for cloud performance testing
   7. Key cloud performance testing metrics
   8. Top cloud performance testing tools
   9. Conclusion
   10. How can Tx help?

An overview of cloud performance testing

Today, digital businesses race to launch high-quality applications as early as possible, and time to market plays an important role in determining the application’s success. However, without effective cloud performance testing, the final product could be futile. There is always a need for tools and techniques that accelerate the development and testing process.

Performance testing simulates heavy loads and assesses the performance of apps and infrastructure to ensure that downtime doesn’t derail a business’s cashflows, promotions, and peak business times.

But on-premise testing comes at a price, takes significant time, needs dedicated infrastructure and has certain limitations. This is where cloud performance testing proves to be a wise business decision. Cloud performance testing is comparatively inexpensive and may be used for testing cloud, web, and installed applications. It uses cloud-based tools to emulate real-world traffic and helps businesses measure their apps’ performance, scalability, security, and reliability.

What are the Key Focus Areas in Cloud Performance Testing?

Cloud performance testing centers around evaluating three fundamental aspects:

Swiftness – Verifying the application’s responsiveness and promptness.

Expandability – Assessing the upper threshold of user load the application can manage.

Reliability – Ensuring the application’s stability across diverse load conditions.

Fundamentally, the objective of performance testing is not the discovery of defects or bugs, but rather the eradication of potential performance bottlenecks that could arise within an application. It’s occasionally denoted as “Perf Testing,” constituting a subset of the broader domain of performance engineering.

Cloud Performance Testing or In-house Testing?

In the past, conventional in-house performance testing constituted a resource-intensive undertaking and placed a strain on IT departments. It necessitated intricate infrastructure and substantial resources that were frequently utilized only intermittently.

As business paradigms evolve and operational frameworks extend beyond physical office spaces, maintaining in-house testing facilities is growing increasingly challenging for organizations. Cloud-based testing tools deviate from conventional in-house applications. Performance testing in the cloud assesses metrics such as the system’s throughput and latency in response to varying numbers of concurrent users accessing the application. Additionally, it gauges diverse load profiles and an array of performance parameters.

Elasticity stands as a pivotal attribute within cloud infrastructure, encapsulating the cloud’s capacity to effectively manage fluctuations in load by augmenting resources during peak demands or rationalizing user distribution when loads diminish. This dynamic adjustment takes place seamlessly within an operational cloud environment.

Scalability, availability, fault tolerance, and reliability constitute additional components that contribute to an ideal cloud infrastructure.

Moreover, cloud-based load testing offers the opportunity to attain peak performance through a cost-efficient approach to testing applications at an expansive scale. This is achieved by simulating load tests encompassing millions of concurrent users originating from diverse geographical locations.

Seven business benefits of cloud performance testing

Cloud performance testing ensures the application runs as intended in a cloud environment with optimum infrastructure and offers the desired user experience. Knowing that the application is at par with the performance standards, digital businesses can focus on scalability, flexibility, and reduced overhead for research and development. Here are the seven key advantages of cloud performance testing:

Supports testing scalability:

While leveraging a cloud-based testing platform, digital businesses do not have to limit the number of users for performance testing. Cloud performance testing is more realistic regarding visits from an expected number of users and from different geo locations just like peak business hours or holiday seasons.

Eases app customization:

Using a cloud system to test applications is advantageous for organizations because they can use it to emulate customer-centric environments. Cloud testing enables the utilization of various permutations of test scenarios that include different configurations, web browsers, OS, and more. As a result, businesses can make the necessary customizations to save costs and time in procuring different devices at different locations.

Supports geographical testing:

Cloud performance testing may be executed from anywhere. In other words, businesses can test their apps globally wherever the app will be available, hence enabling global scalability.

Supports testing for production apps/system:

Application tests are generally limited to their test environment, but it is possible to execute cloud performance testing in production environments.

Reduces overall costs:

Using the cloud as a testing platform reduces the need for installation and maintenance configuration, reducing overall costs.

Improves team collaboration:

Cloud-based testing allows software companies to include DevOps in their workflows because it requires collaboration between developers and testers. Testers can spin up test environments with different configurations and data in the cloud, automate testing processes, integrate with development tools to provide fast feedback and get DevOps to help set up devices.

Enables enterprise app coverage:

While most applications today are browser-based, large enterprise apps require relatively higher computing capabilities. Cloud-based testing enables effective testing with support for various internet protocols, .NET, Java, SAP, Siebel, and other enterprise application protocols to validate web 2.0 applications like AJAX, Silverlight, and Flex.

Types of cloud performance testing

Load test – performed to measure the performance of the application under normal and peak conditions

Failover test – performed to validate the app’s ability to provide extra resources and engage a backup system during system failure

Capacity/volume test – performed to measure the number of users the app can handle before experiencing any issues

Soak test – performed to measure the performance of the application under extreme loads for an extended period

Stress test – performed to measure the performance of the app when exposed to conditions outside of the scope of regular operations

Browser test – validates that the application works as intended when accessed through different web browsers

Targeted infrastructure test – isolates and measures each layer and/or component of the application to test its performance

Latency test – measures the amount of time it takes to move a data packet from one point to another within the network

Six best practices for cloud performance testing

Evaluate the latest load testing tools and models:

Some of the available load-generating apps work across cloud platforms but verifying the compatibility of such tools with the application architecture is essential. Key features such as bandwidth simulation, upload/download speeds, etc., should be accurately represented to understand the load limits.

Leverage automation and scheduling:

Choose the load testing tools that include features such as analytics, reports, and scheduling. This helps DevOps teams avoid overworking production systems while testing and scheduling the ongoing load tests. Once the tests are completed, these tools share comprehensive reports with the respective stakeholders so that everyone has a clear picture of how the app is performing.

Test inside/outside the firewall:

In case of several possible reasons for poor app performance, it is difficult to identify the root cause. The load test plan should include testing both inside and outside the firewall to find and fix the performance bottlenecks.

Simulate real conditions:

Merely exposing the app to high loads until failure may not generate a realistic scenario. Similar is the case with using similar types of devices, browsers, bandwidths, or OS. The load testing environment should be able to provide a diverse range of test scenarios, keeping the user load at a base level with different configurations.

Prioritize the bugs:

To maximize the value of cloud performance testing, teams must prioritize the bugs. Once the data and insights are available, teams should strategically take necessary actions to achieve the maximum ROI from testing efforts.

Consider users as well as servers:

Performance tests are often focused on servers and clusters. However, these tests should measure the human element as well. Cloud performance testing should consider UX for comprehensive test results.

Key cloud performance testing metrics

Cloud performance testing varies from the traditional types of application testing. The main aim of cloud performance testing is to measure the key performance parameters. The following are the critical performance testing metrics digital businesses must consider:

CPU utilization:

The percentage of CPU capacity utilized in processing the requests.

Memory utilization:

Measures the utilization of the computer’s primary memory while processing any work requests.

Response times:

The total time between sending and receiving the request. Better the response time, the better the performance of the application.

Average load time:

This metric determines the time a webpage takes to load and display the content on the screen.

Throughput:

This metric determines the number of transactions an application can handle per second.

Average latency/Wait time:

The time spent by request in a queue before processing.

Bandwidth:

It measures the data volume transferred every second.

Requests per second:

This metric measures the number of requests the app handles every second.

Error rate:

It measures the percentage of requests leading to errors compared to the total number of requests.

Transactions Passed/Failed:

The percentage of passed/failed transactions against the total number of transactions.

Top cloud performance testing tools

Tricentis NeoLoad:

Provides automatic test design and maintenance, simulation of user behavior, fast root cause analysis, and built-in integrations with the entire software development lifecycle toolchain.

CloudTest:

Enables continuous testing process in the cloud without worrying about any hardware.

BlazeMeter:

Facilitates the desired number of users, user behavior, and duration through custom-built load and stress testing scenarios.

AppPerfect:

Helps to design and simulate thousands of users to load test applications for performance, reliability, and scalability.

Azure Load Test:

Used to run URL-based load tests with Azure DevOps and sets all the required parameters to run the test.

SmartBear LoadNinja:

Produces intelligent and accurate data that helps analyze the performance of websites, web applications, and APIs in real-time using accurate browser-based metrics.

LoadView:

Uses the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to generate concurrent user load over the cloud during the load tests.

Conclusion

Performance testing is essential to the app’s success in DevOps processes. A high-performing app is critical for businesses to yield the expected ROI while enabling a great CX to the end users. By leveraging the cloud for performance testing, digital businesses can achieve high-performing and scalable apps without blowing out on costs and timelines. Thus, enterprises should leverage cloud performance testing from a next-gen QA and independent software testing services provider for high-performing apps and faster time to market.

How can Tx help?

Tx is a leading performance testing service provider for businesses across domains. Leverage next-gen testing services provider for your solutions’ end-to-end digital and performance testing to deliver a seamless user experience.

• Predict application behavior and benchmark application performance

• Ensure your application is responsive, reliable, robust, and scalable

• Ensure your application meets all contractual obligations and SLAs for performance

• Comprehensive performance & load testing services across domains and technologies

• Detailed reporting with response times, breakpoints, peak load, memory leaks, resource utilization, uptime, etc.

• Get in touch with our performance testing experts to know more.

The post 6 Best Practices for Cloud Performance Testing first appeared on TestingXperts.

Contents

1. What is Performance Testing
2. What Does Performance Testing Check in any Software?
3. Different Phases of Performance Testing
4. Certain Bottlenecks with Respect to Performance Testing
5. What are the Different Types of Performance Testing?
6. How Does Performance Testing Help Your E-commerce Sites and Mobile Applications?
7. What are the top tools for performance testing?
8. Conclusion

What is Performance Testing

Performance testing is a non-functional type of testing and involves the process by which software or an application is tested to know its current system performance. It checks how your current system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability when tested under varying workload conditions. Effectively, the system is tested under multiple and different load and network conditions and it scrupulously checks the time taken by the system to respond under these loads

This testing process primarily determines the speed with which the system works and it involves tests that are performed within a lab referred to as quantitative tests and the tests that occur in the production-like environment. Currently, with Agile and DevOps methodologies on the go, this testing process plays a crucial role in the software development life cycle

Every business is in need of software applications that perform well under varying load conditions and only such apps with quick loading times will have demand in the market.

What Does Performance Testing Check in any Software?

There is a fear with respect to how an application or demanding software performs under varying loads when it goes live. Under such situations, performance testing process actually measures the Speed, Scalability, Reliability, Robustness and Stability of the application when the system is tested for varying loads of users. Performance testing procedure in the cloud also lets you maximize your returns by utilizing cost-effective means of scalable testing applications.

Primarily Performance Testing Evaluates the below:

Speed: The system is tested and evaluated to check the speed with which it responds

Scalability: Checks the variation in response time/scalability as the load on the system varies

Reliability: Validates whether the app is reliable under prolonged periods of high user traffic

Stability: Evaluates if the system is stable under heavy concurrent user load

Further, software performance testing also accomplishes the below:

→ Evaluates whether the application is production-ready or not

→ Checks and evaluates the various app performance criteria

→ Validates performance characteristics of various systems along with system configurations

→ Identifies if the system has any bottlenecks

Evidently, the actual process of software performance testing is achieved through the different phases that its testing process comprises.

Different Phases of Performance Testing

1. Analyze and evaluate the existing system

2. Gather metrics about the current system performance

3. Develop the required test assets after thorough analysis

4. Create reusable test scripts

5. Configure the load generation environment

6. Start and execute benchmark tests

7. Analyze the results

8. Provide performance improvement recommendations

9. Generate an interim report for each test run

10. Generate final closure report once all the planned tests are completed successfully

Certain Bottlenecks with Respect to Performance Testing

Any of the below mentioned can be effective bottlenecks during the testing process:

→ Software Bottlenecks: Issues with DB queries, Application integrations etc.

→ Hardware Bottlenecks: Shortage of RAM, Disk and CPU resource usages

→ Network Bottlenecks: Transmission medium’s limitations

→ Bottlenecks with Test Environment: Performance test environments tend to be smaller versions of the production environment

→ Issues at times with an unrealistic user behaviour

→ Issues due to the presence of a single or fewer server instances

→ Another constraint is only a subset of functions can be automated at any time

What are the Different Types of Performance Testing?

There are various types of Application and software performance testing, but the common among them are:

Load testing: Load testing is performed to validate the system (application under test) performance under normal (usually around 70% of peak user load) and peak user load. This type of test helps us to tune the system and finalize the baseline. Companies should adopt load testing as a part of their software development life cycle (SDLC).

Stress testing: This type of testing is done to identify the breaking point of the system when its subjected to a user load beyond the expected peak. The breaking point can be defined as a load at which either the response time degrades beyond 10% or transactions start falling by more than 5%. Usually, we subject the system to up to 2x of peak user load during the stress tests.

Spike testing: This is a subset of stress testing and it analyzes the behaviour of the system by suddenly varying the number of users and it also checks if the system is able to >support such situations efficiently

Endurance testing: It is a non-functional type of software performance testing and typically checks the behaviour of the system when it is under significant load (around 70% of peak load) for a longer period of time (usually 8 hours to 72 hours). Specifically, the system is checked for resources leakage like memory leaks, the system fails or any other random behaviour that might be shown by the system

Capacity testing: With this type of testing, also known as scalability testing, helps to identify the actual number of the users that the system can support with current hardware capacity

Volume testing: The system performance is checked by executing multiple data-intensive transactions and validating how efficiently the system behaves with such data volumes

How Does Performance Testing Help Your E-commerce Sites and Mobile Applications?

Delivers Good Speed & Reliability: Your E-commerce website and applications run at good speed even under different loads as these have been tested for their performance. Websites with good loading times are known to attract more traffic due to their effective performance and thus your brand will become more reputed. Performance testing has to be more robust for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Ensures Systems with High Response times and Good Scalability: Systems that have been tested for their performance perform really well without any issues even when numerous user’s login simultaneously. Such systems enhance your brand reputation due to their effective performance.

What are the benefits of Performance testing?

1.  Validates the functional features: The practice of performance testing effectively validates the software features. This will further benefit the organizations to make valid decisions on the software setup.

2. Monitors the speed, stability, and accuracy: The method benefits measuring the app performance such as speed, stability, and accuracy Also, the performance testing practise helps to monitor these important features in critical scenarios.

3. Increases Customer Satisfaction: The practice of performance testing helps to measure the application’s response for the customers. This will sort out the performance bugs and help to increase customer satisfaction.

4. Issues are identified at the early stage: The methodology of performance testing helps the development teams to find the errors before the app release. This will help to avoid scenarios of app failure and effectively increases the scope of the application as the errors are resolved at the earliest.

5. Improves load capacity: The testing practice effectively improves the load capacity and app optimization. This efficiently helps the organizations to increase their user volumes for the application.

To achieve the best result with performance testing, it is important to opt for a tool that is effective to meet the requirements. Therefore, enterprises have to choose the tool based on their business need.

What are the top tools for performance testing?

Some of the most common tools used for performance testing are listed below:

1.  LoadNinja: This tool allows for creating scriptless load tests and results in reduced testing time. LoadNinja helps the teams to increase the test coverage without compromising on the quality. Also, it removes the efforts which are necessary for script translation, dynamic correlation, and script scrubbing.

2. JMeter: JMeter is an open-source tool used for running performance and load tests. This helps to analyze and measure the performance of a range of web and web service applications.

3. WebLoad: This tool is an enterprise-scale load testing tool used for web and mobile load testing. WebLoad features a good number of functionalities such as Load Generation Console, Analytics Dashboard and comprehensive IDE.

4. LoadUI: This tool is popularly known for allowing in the creation of scriptless load tests, distributing the tests on the cloud with load agents. Also, the tool helps to monitor the servers and provides a detailed report by automating the load tests.

5. AppLoader: This tool is specifically designed for business applications and assures to provide the best solutions for load testing. AppLoader allows for testing applications and reproducing the same user experience on all access points.

6. Load Runner: It is a software testing tool designed by Micro Focus. LoadRunner helps with a good number of services, such as testing applications, verifying the performance of the application under load and to measure the behaviour of the application. The tool is proficient in balancing thousands of users at a time.

Conclusion

Application Performance testing validates various factors and checks applications to ensure and maintain their reliability and scalability. Whether your application is an E-commerce website or a mobile app or any other system, it should be well tested to show effective performance characteristics. Hence, it is an important factor for all business applications to handle the real-time traffic and overcome other performance problems for which performance testing should be taken up with testing services providers

Leverage TestingXperts performance testing services to enhance your application performance and such high performing apps are bound to drive more traffic and help spread your brand.

The post Performance Testing – A Complete Guide first appeared on TestingXperts.

1. Why Non-Functional Testing (NFT) Matters?
2. Tx-PEARS: A Unified Approach to Non-Functional Testing
3. Business Benefits of Using Tx-PEARS
4. Summary

Enterprises often look for ways to make their software development projects run smoothly, in sync, and successfully. While doing so, they must also focus on non-functional aspects of their application, such as usability, scalability, performance, accessibility, security, etc. Non-functional testing (NFT) helps ensure that these aspects meet the necessary business requirements to ensure the quality of their products.

However, to achieve these results, businesses require tools to help them deliver faster QA outcomes with quality releases, enabling them to stay ahead. Tx-PEARS, a holistic platform by Tx TCoE, enables non-functional testing requirements effectively in one go. This blog will discuss why non-functional testing is necessary in today’s digital-driven world and how Tx-PEARS supports businesses in their initiatives.

Why Non-Functional Testing (NFT) Matters?

Ignoring non-functional testing can cause the release of software defects, which can affect the brand’s reputation, frustrate customers, and decrease customer volume. In worst-case scenarios, one defect can cause operational problems within interconnected systems. For example, one of the largest car manufacturers, Nissan, recalled its one million vehicles because of a tiny software error in their airbag sensors. There’s another example of a $1.2 billion military satellite launch, which got cancelled due to a software bug during the launch.

These are just a few examples of the damage a small software error can do. With proper testing techniques and quality control protocols, companies can save millions in development and offer top-of-the-line services to their customers. By running non-functional test cases sooner, companies can improve their software reliability, while exceeding their end-customer expectations to increase sales and market value.

Tx-PEARS: A Unified Approach to Non-Functional Testing

Tx-PEARS stands for Performance Engineering, Accessibility, Resilience, and Security. It is an in-house accelerator developed by the Tx Test Center of Excellence (TCoE) to assist businesses in managing their non-functional requirements. This helps enterprises drive better business value with scalable and robust software solutions for a greater customer experience.

This umbrella platform consists of accelerators such as Tx-Perfkit, Tx-Secure, Tx-DevSecOps, Tx-SRE, and Tx-AccessAll. These accelerators work together to help enterprises’ digital applications achieve performance and security benchmarks. They can also secure DevOps pipelines, ensure seamless accessibility, and implement effective fault tolerance protocols. Here’s how it works for businesses:

• Handle non-functional test cases under a single platform.
• Cover application and infrastructure stack to address non-functional requirements.
• Optimize the non-functional testing framework setup time.
• Execute the failure validation plan to understand application and infrastructure resilience.
• Ensure application resiliency and scalability across cloud and on-premises platforms.

Core Accelerators and Capabilities

Tx-Perfkit:

Tx-Perfkit is a performance testing framework that can be deployed on the cloud or on an on-premises platform to generate load on the application under test (AUT). This accelerator helps monitor the application infrastructure and perform load testing on web and mobile apps, blockchain, and IoT applications. To enable continuous performance testing, tx-Perfkit can easily integrate with DevOps CI/CD pipelines.

Tx-Secure:

Tx-Secure is a security testing accelerator consisting of processes, tools, and checklists to enable red team, blue team, and purple team assessments. It helps implement shift-left and shift-right security testing practices to test web and mobile apps, Blockchain, IoT, infra security, and more. It also ensures that business apps adhere to international standards such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, OSSTMM, GDPR, etc.

Tx-DevSecOps:

Tx-DevSecOps is a dynamic DevOps security accelerator that offers a framework for continuous security testing and vulnerability management. It enables businesses to optimize app security within the existing DevOps CI/CD pipeline and ensure safer code deployment. Teams can seamlessly integrate security checks to support a continuous integration of the DevOps pipeline.

Tx-SRE:

Tx-SRE is a Site Reliability Engineering accelerator that helps anticipate and address non-functional production issues by implementing proactive monitoring, alerting, and observability tools. It enables faster root cause analysis of incidents, supports failover testing and chaos engineering to ensure application reliability, and delivers rapid feedback loops to development teams for continuous improvement. Tx-SRE also provides performance prediction and capacity forecasting to optimize production environments and reduce downtime, seamlessly integrating with existing DevOps workflows.

Tx-AccessAll:

Tx-AccessAll is an accessibility testing accelerator that ensures applications comply with WCAG, including versions 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2, to make digital experiences inclusive for all users. It leverages industry-leading automated accessibility testing tools to identify compliance gaps and usability barriers. Tx-AccessAll also provides detailed, custom reports that empower stakeholders with actionable insights for informed decision-making and continuous accessibility improvement.

Business Benefits of Using Tx-PEARS

Tx-PEARS is a comprehensive non-functional testing accelerator that enables enterprises to elevate software quality by addressing critical aspects like performance, accessibility, resilience, and security through a unified platform. It supports testing practices with ready-to-use accelerators, saving 80–90% of the time typically required during the pre-planning phase while enabling faster, quality releases. By integrating seamlessly with DevOps pipelines, Tx-PEARS ensures 99.99% application and infrastructure reliability, supports business continuity even during subsystem failures, and benchmarks application performance against industry standards.

It also delivers highly secure and accessible applications, enabling businesses to enhance consumer confidence, ensure inclusivity for users of all abilities, and strengthen brand reputation. With consolidated capabilities from Tx-Perfkit, Tx-Secure, Tx-DevSecOps, Tx-SRE, and Tx-AccessAll, businesses can save up to 55% on total cost of ownership (TCO) while accelerating their digital quality transformation.

Summary

Tx-PEARS is a unified non-functional testing (NFT) accelerator that empowers enterprises to enhance software quality by addressing performance, accessibility, resilience, and security under one platform. Backed by Tx TCoE, it integrates seamlessly with DevOps pipelines, accelerates testing with ready-to-use components, and ensures 99.99% application reliability. Tx-PEARS helps businesses support compliance with accessibility and security standards and reduces the total cost of ownership by up to 55%. From early defect detection to performance benchmarking, it delivers faster, more secure releases. Contact our experts now to know how Tx can help you future-proof your digital transformation with scalable, high-quality applications.

The post Tx-PEARS: Elevate Software Quality with Smarter NFT Practices first appeared on TestingXperts.

1. Why Performance Testing is Crucial for Black Friday Sales?
2. Prepare for Black Friday Website Downtime
3. Testing Website Black Friday Readiness
4. Why Partner with Tx to Make your Website Ready for Black Friday?
5. Summary

Black Friday is that time of the year when everyone is looking for the best discount deals (offline and online) and wants to get their hands on the most awaited items. The eCommerce market is especially packed with users visiting their favorite brand’s sites to grab the best deals on their favorite products. This causes a heavy traffic rate, causing website slowdown and downtime issues, affecting the website’s performance and leading to a bad user experience. One thing is certain, though, whether offline or online, Black Friday sales always take the market like a storm. Well, for the online part, performance testing can assist with making eCommerce websites ready for Black Friday sales. 

In 2023, Black Friday online sales grew 8% year-over-year (YoY) to $70.9 billion globally and 9% YoY, reaching $16.4 billion in the US alone. With the expectations of having a high revenue collection during this holiday season, one simply cannot risk having their eCommerce stores crash, slow down, or go through downtime. 

Why Performance Testing is Crucial for Black Friday Sales? 

If the website hasn’t gone through proper performance and load checks, it will cause issues for online users when they visit online stores for the best prices. Unresponsive, buggy, and slow websites will frustrate users, and they will leave the store, resulting in user and revenue losses. In addition, it will also harm the brand’s reputation. A similar incident happened in 2022 when Nike, a renowned sportswear brand, encountered a situation where its users couldn’t access the website on Black Friday. The website faced downtime issues, frustrating the users, who had to look for alternatives.  
 
According to statistics, around 50% of visitors expect the website to load in 2 seconds, and 30% want the website to load in 1 second. They will feel disappointed when their requirements are not met and will move to a different website. Around 22% of them will not come back ever again. Around 75% of mobile and tablet users will not even visit a retailer’s app or website if it’s buggy, crashes frequently, and is slow to load. 

To avoid user discontent on Black Friday, businesses should start fixing and optimizing the performance of their websites and mobile applications. The best way to do that is by conducting thorough performance testing for every component that affects UX.  

Prepare for Black Friday Website Downtime 

Websites and apps often fail during the holiday season. Online shoppers want to spend their time and money on the best deals, but if the website or app fails to handle the massive traffic or load, the result will not be good. As one of the biggest retail mega holidays is approaching, businesses must prepare themselves with more robust performance testing. Here are some of the ways performance tests can assist in preparing for Black Friday website downtime: 

• Analyze performance testing metrics to identify whether the website or app performs as expected during functional testing. The shift left approach should be adopted to determine application behavior. Also, identify the server’s current load-handling capacity. 

• Utilize real data collected from last year’s Black Friday sales during peak hours or traffic and apply it to the current year’s projections. 

• Continuously run load tests, simultaneously increase the load to simulate the expected traffic, and analyze and monitor the response time and throughput rate. Repeat this until website stability becomes an issue. Run a series of load tests to determine the server usage patterns. 

• Use different devices to run load tests, as one cannot expect high traffic from a single source. Users use various devices to shop, so it is common knowledge to utilize multiple devices like laptops, tablets, and smartphones.  

• Analyze and review the performance results, identify bottlenecks, and implement the suggested improvements to adjust the website’s performance. 

It could be risky to leave website performance testing until before Black Friday sales or until a user complains about slowness or downtime. Businesses should understand that performance issues take time to resolve. So, fix them beforehand instead of leaving them for the last few days before the peak period.  

Testing Website Black Friday Readiness 

Black Friday is a double-edged sword. If it promises an abundance of sales, it also pays off with website downtime or meltdowns due to heavy traffic. However, by partnering with a reliable QA services provider and proper preparations, businesses can ensure their site’s robustness to deliver exceptional UX. Let’s take a look at some key pointers to ensure the website’s readiness this Black Friday sales season: 

Load and Stress Testing:

Knowing whether the site can handle the rush is crucial. Load and stress tests simulate real-world scenarios by injecting a large amount of user access into the website. Businesses can use existing traffic data to set a load and stress testing baseline. It will give insights into how the server, database, and other backend systems perform under pressure. After running the tests, analyze the results to pinpoint the weak areas (server resource exhaustion, database slowdowns, payment security issues, etc.). After identifying the improvement areas, businesses and their QA partner can work on performance optimizations, like code refactoring, database optimization, server upgrades, etc.  

Endurance Testing:

There will be a tremendous load on Black Friday. Knowing how a website will perform under such conditions is very important. Endurance testing will evaluate how well an eCommerce store can perform under a sustained high load. It will determine whether the store can handle increased traffic without affecting user experience.   

UX Testing:

Even if a website is technically perfect, it would mean nothing if it were hard to navigate for users. This is why user experience testing is important, ensuring the site’s navigation is intuitive. By running A/B tests with different menus and layouts, teams can identify which one will fit best with every user. Also, the search functionality must return results accurately and faster. Using filters and auto-suggestions will allow users to find what they are looking for easily. Perform thorough testing of the checkout process and take feedback for any issues real users encounter.  

Promo Codes and Discounts Testing:

Black Friday’s other name is Discounts and Deals. Businesses should test the checkout page to ensure the promo codes and discounts work as intended. This will help avoid sales disruption, user frustration, and transaction failures.  

Multi-device Testing:

Nowadays, users use multiple devices to shop online during the holiday season. Testing the website and app across multiple devices (smartphones, laptops, and PCs), OS, and browsers will ensure the site displays and performs as expected for every shopper.  

Updates Testing:

Websites and apps receive updates before the Black Friday sale. New links, banners, color schemes, pages, and other elements are added to attract online shoppers. This is why testing new functionalities before going live is crucial. Failure to do so will make it harder to provide quality UX.  

Why Partner with Tx to Make your Website Ready for Black Friday? 

In the chaos of Black Friday sales, customers prefer businesses that offer reliable and swift shopping experience. Black Friday sales can significantly boost your revenue, but only if your website can handle the horde of users without budging. You should leverage performance and load testing services to ensure optimal website performance under heavy loads during Black Friday. Partner with Tx to boost your website performance for the following reasons: 

Performance Testing:

Our performance or load testing services will ensure your website or mobile app performs as expected under heavy load during Black Friday. We conduct different types of performance testing, such as stress testing, load testing, isolation testing, soak testing, and spike testing. 

Real-time Monitoring:

Switch action significantly differs between temporary glitches and stretched downtime. We use cutting-edge tools to provide real-time analytics about your site’s performance. Our QA team is always ready to act if an anomaly (server issues, checkout glitches, inventory errors, etc.) is detected.  

AI Chatbots Testing:

Utilizing AI-powered chatbots to handle bulk user queries can free up your support team for complex issues. Our AI chatbot testing solutions ensure seamless implementation within your website. 

Security Testing:

During the Black Friday sales, the chances of cyberattacks will be much higher. Our security testing experts will assist you in delivering safe and secure UX and transactions to keep your brand image intact. In context of performance testing, we will also ensure your website/app can handle malicious attempts to break it while it’s under load. 

Tx-PEARS:

Our in-house accelerator, Tx-PEARS, can assist with all non-functional testing requirements. It is a consolidated platform to perform security, performance, and accessibility testing, allowing you to deliver scalable, reliable, accessible, and robust apps to your end-users. 

Summary 

Black Friday 2024 is around the corner, and checking the preparedness of your websites and mobile apps is essential. Retailers and eCommerce businesses must leverage various software testing services to deliver a seamless UX and prepare for the upcoming Black Friday sales season. Partnering with Tx for performance testing helps safeguard your website’s reliability, ensuring it performs optimally during this peak shopping period. We offer comprehensive load testing, real-time monitoring, AI chatbot testing, and security assessments to maintain seamless UX. Our Tx-PEARS platform further enhances non-functional testing, providing robust and secure solutions to meet the demands of Black Friday sales. To know how Tx’s performance testing services can assist in resolving the website’s performance and downtime issues, contact our experts now. 

The post Prevent Black Friday Website Downtime with Performance Testing  first appeared on TestingXperts.