Why are we doing performance testing?
Have you ever tried a website or a mobile application and you’ve found that it takes too much time to load the page and process your data, or Have you tried to access any application in its rush time and couldn’t access it? This is definitely because of performance issues of the application, Performance of the application is a non-function attribute of the application, which means How does the application perform under certain conditions ?! so we give it more care in software testing.
Performance is so important for the software as it ensures certain qualities for the users, the application might work well if it has one or two users using it but what if it has hundreds and thousands or even millions of users! , no one wishes to have such above experience, especially for the critical domains, If a user faced one of these problems and he has other options for the service he will go for your competitor, so lack of performance testing might cause fewer customer retention and less profit.
To get more sense of the importance of Performance testing, let’s check these statistics based on important research: Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. (Unbounce, 2019), this means that the faster your page the more revenue you will get as it encourages the customers to use your application as it saves them time. Also, Statistics show that the ideal load time for any page is between 0 t 4 seconds. One of the common situations is if you called any customer service center to query any information on their database, if it takes too much time, for sure you won’t be satisfied with this service
Another important factor of performance to be checked is scalability, and scalability is to measure the maximum load of the website, while developing the application there is only one user which is the developer, so he doesn’t face any problems regarding scalability, but when the software is launched and the number of users starts to increase which may reach millions of users on some applications, those users expect that could deal with the whole functions of the applications without having any problems, While scalability measures the ability of your application to handle the growth of users numbers, Stress testing tries to test your application under extreme conditions, Doing stress testing gives the team more information about the software, it tries to figure out the cause root of the system crash.
Some situations that might affect the performance are planned situations and you can expect it like expecting a rush in user’s number is certain to date and time and some of them are unplanned, so putting performance testing in your testing plan is not a luxury, it’s mandatory so you can keep your customer and increase your revenue
