The Ever-Increasing Importance of Application Performance
Non-functional areas of an application have been steadily growing in importance. While an application’s functionality is very important, users have equally started to value non-functional areas, such as performance, usability, accessibility, and UI. The focus on performance is a niche area in which test teams have been specializing and includes the application’s responsiveness, loading, scaling and capacity handling, tuning, and performance against competition.
Users have started prioritizing non-functional areas of quality and are ready to move on to newer options if an application’s performance does not meet their needs. All of this has necessitated a very formal and focused performance test strategy among test teams, regardless of the short testing cycles they have. Results from preliminary performance tests are used to not only gauge an application’s release readiness but also to create a market expectation before users get to experience the application.
Microsoft is currently touting its upcoming Microsoft Edge browser as part of Windows 10, including an expected and incredible performance gain of 112 percent over the widely-used Google Chrome. If this is indeed true, this will be a great reason for Windows users to use the Edge browser, which will be a great comeback for Microsoft.
Studies show that online applications, especially travel sites, face heavy performance driven competition where even a one second response delay impacts their user conversions by 7 percent. Users are not willing to wait for more than 3 seconds for a page to load. These numbers are getting increasingly competitive, making performance testing an ongoing challenge for teams to handle, improve, and get better at, both against their own benchmarks and against competition.
Testers are increasingly being empowered to take on more robust and sophisticated performance tests, including using performance test tools, frameworks, and infrastructure. Cloud computing has made it possible to conduct realistic performance tests and has also greatly helped testers focus on the strategic pieces of the test rather than spending long cycles in machine setup.
Tools to help with the more complex areas of performance testing such as result analysis are also on the rise. These are a true blessing to testers, as often the issue is not even about running a performance test but has more to do with how to interpret the results into actionable items.
The parameters involved in application performance are large and diverse—tactically measuring an application’s load handling capabilities, translating results into meaningful decisions that management and stakeholders can consume, using good performance results to market an application, and helping testers and developers understand the product’s market performance so as to bring in better product contextual understanding.
Given all of these parameters at play, the importance of an application’s performance will only continue to rise and differentiate itself as a niche of its own in the software development world.
