Does Your Application Meet Its Operational Demands at Peak Loads?

PublishTime： 2023-08-31 Article Source：Keysight Blogs

Performance testing is the non-functional testing requirement that everyone knows is essential. It’s also the easiest to drop when time or resources (or both) are constrained.

But if your application experiences traffic spikes, then not performing proper performance testing is an accident waiting to happen.

In the first instance, slow load times or service outages harm the customer experience. There’s a risk your brand’s credibility is damaged as it becomes the next day’s negative headline or starts trending on social media. Your customer service and social media teams have to spend time dealing with angry and frustrated customers. Your marketing team laments the campaign that felt flat because capacity wasn’t high enough to meet the demand it generated. And all eyes turn to the DevOps team as the source of the issue.

Then consider the very real risk of loss of revenue and missed business. When a webpage is slow to load or a website crashes, customers won’t hesitate to turn to an alternative supplier – and may never return. Goodwill and reputation are eroded for the visitor and amplified through social media.

When Deloitte analyzed mobile site data in 2020, it found that site speed made a startling difference. Just a 0.1s improvement in load time can influence every step of the user journey. Conversions grew by 8% for retail sites and 10% for travel sites. Retail consumers spent almost 10% more, while lead generation and luxury consumers engaged more, with page views increasing by 7% and 8% respectively.

The Reality of Performance Testing

Of course, none of this is anything you don’t know. Yet for very good reasons, neglecting website performance testing is a risk many brands decide it's worth taking.

Performance testing to ensure applications can meet performance, availability, and functionality demands at peak times is a demanding and time-consuming task. It involves more work than a typical QA team can achieve as part of their day-to-day activity, especially when there’s a time crunch to issue a new release.

And if traffic spikes only happen a handful of times a year, hiring performance testers to conduct performance testing or performance monitoring may not be a viable option either. It means recruiting people with niche, specialized skill sets who may be under-utilized for many months at a time. Even if recruiting is the answer, finding new team members and bringing them up to speed can take months. It’s a solution to avoiding next year’s traffic spikes, but not the one that’s a couple of months away.

So what's the answer?

It's to outsource your performance testing and harness the potential of Performance as a Service (PaaS).

The Benefits of Keysight Eggplant's Performance as a Service

When you outsource performance testing you don’t take up in-house resources, such as provisioning infrastructure, or need to recruit or train new team members. Instead, you get a rapid project turnaround time and an immediate return on investment because you can hit the ground running.

Your dev team gets real-time feedback on the issues impacting performance or causing crashes so they can start fixing them immediately.

You also gain objective and quantifiable metrics and performance analysis under different load conditions. You can compare these results with your SLA benchmarks to obtain independent validation that your application meets the promised performance levels.

When you outsource performance testing to Eggplant you get additional benefits.

You get a 20-year legacy of expertise in performance testing for some of the world’s largest companies and biggest testing projects, something that empowers us to handle any scale or challenge your project may present.

Our global team gives you a follow-the-sun model that enables 24/7 testing. Our fixed-price service helps you control your costs, and because we use Eggplant Performance you can seamlessly transition from PaaS to in-house testing when the time is right.

Eggplant’s tried-and-tested PaaS solution covers planning, scripting, executing, and reporting. The test phase itself is as robust and comprehensive as you would expect. It applies the correct server load capacity strategy to simulate your live environment at peak and could include a selection of performance, peak, stress, soak, smoke, and spike testing depending on the specific requirements of the engagement.

The Funky Pigeon Experience

One company that harnessed what Eggplant’s PaaS has to offer is Funky Pigeon, the market-leading online personalized greeting cards and gift business based in the UK.

Funky Pigeon had been used to high seasonal demand but faced a new challenge when it was building a completely new website that would revolutionize the way that shoppers customized their purchases.

The Tech Ops team was able to functionally test the usual journeys that users would make on the website but had no way of knowing what would happen when several thousand people were visiting the site at the same time.

Brett King, Head of Tech Ops at Funky Pigeon, said: “In scoping the project out with the Eggplant team, we were delighted to establish they would be able to complete this work in less than a month. We don’t do load testing every day, so being able to outsource to the Eggplant team just for the specific time and work required made perfect sense.”

He added: “Trying to do this work ourselves wouldn’t have been easy or cost-effective. Using the Eggplant Services team enabled us to complete the project far quicker and for a much lower cost than if we’d tried to do it in-house.”

Not only that, Brett was clear that this work had a positive impact on holiday revenue numbers.

Secure the Benefits of Performance Testing with Eggplant

Performance testing helps you identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in your application.

Ultimately, it enables you to guarantee performance and prove your application can handle peak traffic loads during peak trading hours. It minimizes the risk of lost revenue and a damaged reputation.

Not only that, it helps you identify potential vulnerabilities in the system that could lead to data breaches or unauthorized access, as well as other regulations such as accessibility compliance, system availability, and uptime.

You can also prepare for growth by assessing performance at different user concurrency levels to improve application scalability.

Choosing Eggplant's PaaS solution enables you to reap all these rewards without the impact on time and resources of conducting it in-house.

It gives you access to a dedicated team of professionals committed to helping you optimize performance capabilities, minimize risks, and unlock the full potential of your application.

In other words, it gives you everything you need to deliver an outstanding customer experience and maximize revenue.

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