Software Quality Assurance Blog

Performance Testing of eBusiness Applications

by EDITOR on 15/12/06 at 1:23 pm

The world will wait…

Studies have shown that the average web user will wait, but only for about eight seconds before becoming frustrated.  Most will move along after 30 seconds to a competitors web-site and probably won’t return to the site where they experienced slow response times.  In the hyper-competitive web environment, your competition is only one click away.

Performance for applications in corporate/intranet environments is equally important.   Poor performance can waste your employees’ time and discourage them from using the systems you invested in to boost their productivity.  Even worse than lost productivity can be corruption or loss of data that can occur when functionality breaks down under high traffic conditions.

Why did performance testing become important? 

You didn’t used to conduct performance tests, and you got along O.K., so what changed?  Today’s eBusiness applications are being developed and implemented in significantly different ways from the mainframe and client/server applications that were created just a few years ago: 

• Tighter Deadlines: Time-to-market concern is heightened, and development cycle times have dropped from months to weeks.  This may lead to a mistaken decision to cut corners and skip performance analysis and testing.
• Integration: It is common for eBusiness projects to integrate off-the-shelf components from six, eight, or more vendors.  Developers are sometimes not familiar with the performance behavior of components.  What works fine for the first few months may suddenly degrade as volume increases.
• End-Users: The “audience” for your applications has jumped exponentially. Your potential users now number in the  hundreds of thousands, or even the millions.  Popular web-sites have literally been victims of their own success as they are overwhelmed by high traffic conditions.

To address these differences, companies will need to preserve the best practices and disciplines they have previously used to create quality products and add new processes, methods and tools.  QA Consultants  has been actively involved in helping many of our clients to successfully make this transition.