Every company wants to launch products as quickly as possible, and in this desperation, many forget the importance of testing. Before you decide on your go-to-market date, it is important
that your apps are completely ready with everything that your users want. Your users may have long anticipated your application, and this may result in thousands of users trying to access the application on launch day. The chances of crashing on launch day increase significantly if you have not performed scalability testing and stress testing for your applications. No one wants to disappoint their users with a bad first impression; hence, load and performance testing services are important. If you are not aware of both these testing types, don’t worry; we will have a quick look at them below, and later on, we will understand why this testing is important before going to market.
What is Load Testing?
Load testing is a type of testing where continuous requests are passed to the software product, which imitates real-world scenarios. This testing helps teams understand whether their developed infrastructure can handle real-world user loads without slowing down performance.
What is Performance Testing?
Performance testing is a type of testing where teams try to evaluate the speed, stability, scalability, and security of their newly developed products. Performance testing is the superset
of load testing, and there are various other types of performance testing processes, too. Having known about performance testing, let’s move ahead and understand the process you
should follow before going to market.
Performance Testing Process Before Go To Market
1. Plan Tests and Configure the Environment
Before you begin the performance testing process, it is important to plan the tests you should run to get the correct insights. Once you have planned the tests, it is time to configure the environment where you will run your test cases.
2. Develop The Planned Test Cases
Developing the planned test cases is another step in the process that needs to be done efficiently. If you develop the test cases inefficiently, you may end up with unrealistic results. Hence, always develop the test cases in the most optimized manner.
3. Execute Testing Process
After the test case development is done and optimized for usage, you should execute the testing process. While carrying out the performance testing process, always have new sessions for each test session so that previous metrics do not affect the new session reports.
4. Analyze and Interpret Test Results
Performance testing is done to gather data and insights about the speed and scalability of your products and infrastructure. After completing the testing process, you should spend ample time analyzing and interpreting the test results. The more analysis you do, the better your infrastructure and code optimization efforts will turn out.
Importance of Load and Performance Testing
1. Identify Performance Under Load
The primary reason behind performance testing is to understand the application performance, and it is quite important, too. With quality performance testing, you can understand the response time of each request, how servers communicate with each other to arrive at the final response, how much memory is used behind serving the request from start to end, etc. All these performance metrics help you evaluate whether you have architected a system correctly or you have just made your way through the entire development process.
2. Estimating Application Scalability
Load testing, which is another type of performance testing, helps you find the maximum number of requests you can serve with a specific configuration. With continuous load testing, you can know the limits of your systems, and you can work on improving the numbers to accommodate more users.
When you load test your systems, you can also quickly understand the scalability of your system. Moreover, once you have a baseline estimate of the best performance of your infrastructure, you can keep that in mind and create auto-scaling policies or other things that make your infrastructure flexible and available for everyone.
3. Serve Customers With Speed
No visitor likes a slow website, and having a slow website is the major reason for loss for many businesses. When you are preparing for a product release, you need to spend ample time configuring your systems for speed and performance from the first day.
You can carry out performance testing and load testing to understand the speed of your products across infrastructure changes. Moreover, performance testing can be carried out with automated testing tools to save time and have consistent results at all times. After you have identified issues in your performance testing process, you can also fix them to serve customers with speed and the best version of your code.
4. Remove Bugs and Bottlenecks
Every software product goes through bottlenecks and bugs before it gets completely refined. Bugs and bottlenecks can be introduced to your applications knowingly or unknowingly, but it is essential to fix them before you launch the product. Customers often consider software reliability as an important measure before selecting any product. If you do lots of performance testing and load testing on your product, you will start to understand the bottlenecks in your products, and you can do bottleneck analysis to find ways to fix them before they become serious issues. The same happens with bugs. Certain code blocks can execute without issues when they are not loaded heavily, but they can start misbehaving once undergoing serious load. Loading testing
code will help you in finding and fixing bugs early on in the development cycle.
5. Make the Application Secure and Stable
When building and rolling out an enterprise application, security and stability are often prioritized before flashy features. You may put checks and balances across your systems, but they cannot be validated without any crisis situations. On the other hand, if crisis situations arise in production environments, the results can be devastating. You may lose a lot of data due to any security compromise, or the application’s stability may get compromised.
To protect your applications from such conditions, it is important to load and performance test them correctly. This way, you can find out problems early on and fix them so that there is no issue in production environments. Having known about the different benefits of performance and user experience testing, you might be sure to start this testing process before launching every product. Include some time in all your go-to-market plans to ensure that you deliver the best and highest-performing products always.
