Performance testing
Performance testing is the practice of determining how applications, hardware, networks, databases, etc will perform under pressure. The main goal is to improve speed, scalability, stability and reliability. Performance issues have a nasty habit of turning up late in the application life cycle. The later you discover them, the greater the cost and effort to resolve.
Process
How we test the performance of your digital application
Every project starts with defining clear goals and assigning responsible persons (at your side and ours). Further on the benchmarks are set, what do we expect to know after testing had been done? Then a straight forward process starts:
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1. Identify the stakeholders
Who to include to get a better understanding of what to test and who can help when performance issues are found
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2. Understand the situation
What is the architecture, normal usage of the system, number of concurrent users, what do we want to test, what is the goal of the test…
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3. Decide on KPI’s, tooling and parameters to monitor
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4. Agree on the needed scripts
What are the actions we need to simulate?
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5. Define the scenarios
For each script; how many virtual users do we want to run, ramp-up, simulate different devices and browsers, load different countries, …
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6. First sets of runs
Identify and improve the found issues followed by a debrief of the results and a baseline for future runs
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7. Include performance in the testing routine as a whole
Boxes to check for the best ROI
✓ Choose the best tooling, suitable for your case. Also if this means throwing another one out the window. Our experts are skilled in both open-source as paid tooling. We are vendor-independent, so you can count on an honest and objective advice.
✓ Dare to automate when you integrate. Experience taught us automating the right test scripts at the right time increases your ROI significantly.
✓ Be prepared to test, don’t test to be prepared. Allocate budget and resources to test the performance of your application from the start. The later you discover bugs, the more you pay to fix them.
Frequently asked questions
Is performance testing relevant for your company?
If you have a company website, it is already relevant. Next to a marketing point of view every website, webshop, ERP, …should be performant at any moment as your reputation as reliable partner is at stake. Downtime can cause harmful long-term damage to your brand.
To clarify some numbers:
- 66% of customers said website performance influences their impression of the company and 33% of customers have a negative impression of companies with a poor performing website
- 47% of customers expect to wait no longer than two seconds for a web page to load. After that, consumer tolerance wears and 40% of the visitors leave a web page if it doesn’t load in less than three seconds
- The results of a one-second increase in download: 78% conversion decrease, 64% increased bounce rate, 4,3% loss of revenue per visitor
Do you partner with vendors?
Yes, for performance we partner with octoperf. An overview of all our partners can be found here.
