Time to Act: Why Building Apps Need Performance Testing in 2022?

6 min read Jan 29, 2021

Even if you’re a small business owner and don’t have enough budget to spend on the app development, you do have the ability to ask for a performance test to a company and implement it in your app to see the impressive results. Performance testing is extremely important to satisfy your customer; if your app’s performance doesn’t fulfill your customers' expectations, they will choose your competitor to acquire products and services. 

Pay attention to the performance of your application. If your app seems excellent to your users, they take a few seconds to leave a good review on your platform. Keep in mind, good reviews amp up your brand’s reputation without demanding additional work from your end. 

You’ve made a new product, website, or application and delivered it to the market. You’re analyzing some traffic and some conversion. But something is making your customer dissatisfied. Could it be speed? In today’s society of limited patience and lower attention spans, you should ensure that you’re providing an enjoyable experience to your customers. Why is impressing your customers important? It is simple. The performance of your application could affect your financial statement, and it’s related to revenue. That’s why you need to give importance to performance testing to make your app successful in 2022. 

The Customer Experience 

Customers are kings and queens & you’re their servants. What affects them the most & what do you need to remember in mind while serving them digital experiences? As per the research done by Fast Company, Amazon estimated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has assumed that by slowing its search results by only fourth tenths of a second, they could experience a loss of 8 million searches in a day- meaning they’d offer up several million fewer online ads. Therefore, performance can have a significant impact on your sales while using your app by customers. 

Customer Experience

Help Your Apps Stand Out with Performance Testing in 2022 

Performance testing is a software testing procedure that is used to test the response time, speed, stability, scalability, reliability, and resource usage of a software application under a specific workload. Performance testing aims to identify and remove the performance bottlenecks in the software application. It is known as “Perf Testing” and is a subset of performance engineering. 

Developing a fully-functional mobile app or web app is crucial, but how it performs is equally a critical challenge that you should accept to make your product publicly acceptable. 

According to Gartner’s study, by 2021, companies that will be integrating the performance engineering strategy for application development will beat the competition. It helps them improve customer satisfaction and business results. 

Some Reasons to Conduct Performance Test While Building an App 

1. Experts believe that mobile applications are found with more errors than what has been reported. Mobile apps face network issues, mainly when the server is congested. If you run an app on unreliable mobile networks, it can become more difficult. Here are some problems that most of the apps face in such situations are:

  • Failure Uploads. 
  • Frequent timeouts. 
  • Booking or checkout errors. 
  • Stalling and Freezing. 
  • Broken files or issues with file downloads. 
  • Large black holes in the content feed. 

2. Poor application experience is the reason for frustrated customers, and it has an impact on revenues. Based on the research, more than 47% of the respondents experience a broken image issue and immediately decide to exit the application. 

3. The speed of the app changes as per locations. It is essential to make an app region or country-wise and perform testing on it. Some countries use 3G connections; some have 4G connections, some are still using 2G connections. Thus, when you consider performance testing services, it is vital to check whether the users can use the application or not or they have network issues in their area. Internal testing should be carried out to test the performance of applications with varying speeds and different networks. 

4. If the app gives an outstanding performance to 1,000 users, it should behave well when the user base increases to 8,000 to 10,000. The goal of the performance testing is to identify bugs and address some performance issues like inappropriate physical behavior, the quantity of work, quality of work, resistance to change, and improper personal relations. You should not only give focus on the improvement of features and functionality of a software system. It will help if you give priority to a software app’s performance, such as scalability, reliability, resource usage, and response time. 

The most important thing is performance testing helps improve those areas which are needed before the product goes to market. In case of skipping a performance test, your app can suffer from issues such as poor usability, inconsistencies across different operating systems, slow running while several users use it simultaneously. An application that is approved without a performance test can help you gain a bad reputation and even doesn’t help you while meeting expected sales goals. 

Only a 5-minute outage of Google.com (19-Aug-13) is expected to cost the search giant as much as $545,000. Due to a recent Amazon web service failure, it is reported that businesses have suffered a loss of worth $1100 per second. 

Hence, performance testing matters a lot for building apps in 2022. 

Performance Testing Services

Understanding the Different Types of Performance Testing 

Load Testing 

Load testing verifies the app’s working capacity with expected user loads. Before allowing your software to go live, you must fix performance glitches. 

Stress Testing

The goal of stress testing is to evaluate whether an application can bear heavy traffic under extreme workloads. The main target of the stress test is to find out the breaking point of an application. 

Spike Testing 

It is a kind of performance testing where the software or an application receives an extreme and a sudden increase or decrease in a particular load. The behavior of a software application is analyzed by testers when it shows extreme variations in traffic. 

Endurance Testing 

The goal of performing endurance testing on software is to ensure that it can easily manage the expected load for a long time. 

Scalability Testing 

Scalability testing helps determine the effectiveness of a software app and may support when there is an increase found in user load. 

Volume Testing 

In volume testing, a wide variety of data is stored in a database, and then the entire software system’s behavior is monitored by testers. The objective is to run the software faster with varying database volumes. 

Popular Performance Testing Tools 

  • LoadNinja. 
  • HP LoadRunner. 
  • Jmeter. 
  • NeoLoad. 

The Best Ways to do Performance Testing for Building Apps 

  • Identify Your Testing Environment - It is important to know your physical testing environment, testing tools, and production environment. You must understand the necessary details of the software, hardware, and network configurations before beginning your testing process. Hire an experienced performance tester to create more efficient tests and address possible challenges. 
  • Know the Performance Acceptance Criteria - In this phase, you should involve important goals and constraints of throughput, resource allocation, and response times. Being a diligent tester, you should identify the success criteria of a client’s project outside of these constraints and goals as sometimes, a range of performance metrics will not include in project requirements. You can find a similar application to match the output and compare the app’s performance. 
  • Plan and Design Performance Tests - You should include all the details in the performance test plan, which you want to implement as a strategy during the requirement analysis phase. You should design some use cases, identify a number of end-users, and plan out some data on which you decide to conduct performance testing. 
  • Configure your Test Environment - Before starting the implementation of performance test cases, you should prepare the test environment as well as consider the best resources and testing tools. 
  • Test Design Implementation - It would be great if you create the performance test as per your test design. 
  • Run the Tests - After having all things in your hand, it’s time to implement and monitor the tests. 
  • Evaluate, Adjust & Re-Test - Evaluate the test cases that you’ve prepared for the project. You can make as many adjustments in your tests due to the customization benefits in testing. In the end, if you’ve obtained inappropriate testing results, you can start performance testing again by using the right test automation tools and maximize the value of the software. 

Basic Parameters that You Need to Monitor for Performance Testing 

  • Memory use. 
  • Processor usage. 
  • Bandwidth. 
  • Disk time. 
  • Private bytes. 
  • Page faults/second. 
  • Memory pages/second. 
  • Committed memory. 
  • Disk queue length. 
  • CPU interrupts per second. 
  • Network output queue length. 
  • Response time. 
  • Throughput. 
  • Network bytes total per second. 
  • Hit ratios. 
  • Maximum active sessions. 
  • Amount of connection pooling. 
  • Database locks. 
  • Rollback segment. 
  • Thread counts. 
  • Top waits. 
  • Garbage Collection. 

Wind-Up 

In software engineering, it is necessary to ensure the performance of any software before introducing it to the market because it protects an investor’s investment against product failure and helps in satisfying the customer’s needs. In the evolution of digital ecosystems, performance decline and app crashes are two pitfalls faced by even big brands globally. 

To avoid the dreadful issues, you need to invest in a top-notch performance testing service, and the best part is Seasia Infotech is already ready for your assistance. As a CMMI level 5 software development company, we can build stable, reliable, and scalable software that can help you stay ahead in the cut-throat competition and promise you to provide improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. 

Rupinder Pal Kaur

Rupinder is a writer by day and reader by night. Her passion for technology is second to none. Prior to writing, she believes in carrying out a deep-research by stepping into the audience’s shoes and understanding the real-world perspective. Apart from writing, she’s a nature enthusiast who loves exploring new places.