Importance of Performance Testing

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In our previous article, I have explained What is Performance Testing?

In this article, I am going to explain the importance of Performance Testing (i.e. Why Performance Testing is necessary?)

Lets get started.

Importance of Performance Testing

For businesses that are running on applications, performance is gaining more importance than ever before. Users expect a fast, fantastic and friction-less experience while browsing the applications on Desktop computer or a mobile device. A little delay or a temporary glitch can make Users go impatient and move to your competitors websites.

The speed of website or application has a direct impact on sales and conversions by impacting the customer experience. As per the research from Aberdeen Group, even a delay of 1 second in page load time may lead to 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions.

Transforming the above into dollars, if your application or site earns $100,000 per day, then you will lose $2.5 million every year due to a delay of just 1 second.

Customers lose patience when a page doesn’t load in 2 seconds or less, for each second above this threshold conversion drops by 6.7%.

Hence we need to perform Performance Testing on the applications, uncover the Performance issues and get them fixed to maximize the revenue by speeding the website by just 1 second or more.

Apart from the above, the following are the different reasons that will insists us on the importance of performing Performance Testing in our day to day projects:

1. Performance Testing can tell us whether the application can handle the expected load over a long period of time
2. Performance Testing can give us confidence about the application loading speed.
3. Performance Testing when performed earlier can help us in taking measures in preventing the application from crashes.
4. Performance Testing when performed, gives us the results for different application metrics like Response Time, Throughput, memory, CPU Utilization and so on (These metrics will be explained in detailed in the upcoming articles). We can use these actual results with the expected results, to see whether our application has good or expected performance.
5. Without performance Testing, Application could gain bad reputation or result in loss of money due to crashes at the peak sales times etc.
6. Performing Testing is very helpful to uncover the performance bottlenecks and resolve them before the application hits the market or client hands.

Real Time Examples

Now lets go through few real time examples, which help us in understanding the importance of Performance Testing:

Example#1 – According to the retail aggregate LoveTheSales.com, “J Crew Website” was crashed on Black Friday sale. Which was downtime for 5 hours on Black Friday morning. Considering the average of J Crew Company, minimum 323000 shoppers got impacted and sales of worth $US 775,000 were lost.

Example#2 – As per Krystina Gustafson (CNBC), Macys Website was down on Black Friday due to traffic spike. Digital revenues were expected to rise 11.3%, but on Black Friday it was $3.05 billion. Like CNBC channel mentioned that the Macys retailer lose about 4% of a day according to each hour. Web Performance was reported that each page of the web was taking more than 25 seconds for loading.

Example#3 –  Amazon.com servers were crashed in the year 2013 for 30 minutes. As a result of this, Amazon lost $66,240 per second.

Above are only few examples, but there are many companies facing the similar problems like above and losing reputation and revenue due the performance issues.

Here concludes this article and in the next article, I will explain about the different types of Performance Testing.

Next Steps:

• > To learn more about Performance Testing, continue to the next post (Click on Next Post Link Below)
• > Check complete Performance Testing Tutorial Contents here (Click here)

Please leave your questions/comments/feedback below.

Happy Learning ?

About Me > Sunaina Joshi

Connect to me on Linked In (Click here)

On a mission to contribute to the Software Testing Community in all possible ways.

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