Performance Testing Challenges Faced by Enterprises and How to Overcome Them

Introduction

Mobile applications have assimilated into our daily lives and are used for a variety of things, including entertainment, education, banking, and shopping. Before applications are made available to the general public, their performance and stability are assessed through the process of app performance testing. With the increasing demand for mobile applications, it is imperative to ensure that they deliver a seamless digital experience without any performance issues. Performance testing is the process of examining an application to evaluate if it satisfies performance standards and operates at its best in various situations. 

This blog highlights the importance of app performance testing during the economic downturn and app performance testing challenges faced by enterprises and how to overcome them.

Significance of Enhancing App Performance Testing During the Economic Recession

Businesses are under enormous pressure to maintain their market share and consumer loyalty during an economic downturn. Their revenue, reputation, and competitiveness may all be severely impacted by how well their applications function in such a situation. Before their apps reach customers, businesses can find and fix any flaws by performing app performance testing. This guarantees that the apps function without hiccups, deliver a flawless user experience, and live up to consumers' expectations. This raises customer happiness and fosters brand loyalty, both of which help businesses maintain their market share throughout the recession. Additionally, efficient performance testing tools help companies reduce the cost of development, minimize the risk of downtime, and improve the quality of the application, thus, making it a valuable investment for companies during an economic downturn.

Please check: The Increasing Need for Performance Testing in Web Applications

App Performance Testing: Challenges and Solutions

Challenge 1: Determining the scope of performance testing

Determining the scope of performance testing is challenging for enterprises for various reasons. Firstly, the scope of performance testing varies depending on the nature of the application, system, or software being tested. Different applications may have unique user requirements, functionality, and performance demands, which makes it difficult to determine the scope of testing. Secondly, enterprises need to consider the infrastructure, hardware, and software resources required for testing, which can be a complex process. Additionally, enterprises need to determine the right performance metrics, test scenarios, and testing tools to be used in the testing process. The changing requirements and the increasing complexity of applications make it challenging for enterprises to determine the scope of performance testing, which requires careful planning and execution.

Test your mobile apps on real devices in 50+ locations worldwide. Learn more.

Solution: 

The first step that QA teams need to work on is identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most for their applications. Some common KPIs used in app testing include response time, resource usage, and scalability. Once QA teams have identified the required KPIs, they can create a performance testing plan that outlines the scope of testing, testing objectives, test cases, and testing environment.

Also check: A guide on automation testing for mobile app performance optimization

Challenge 2: Automating customer user journeys

Automating customer user journeys during app performance testing is difficult, as it requires capturing the diverse and often unpredictable ways that real users interact with an application. Unlike scripted testing, where QA experts follow a predetermined set of steps, realistic user behavior can vary greatly depending on the individual user's preferences, device specifications, network connectivity, and other environmental factors. Also, accurately simulating realistic user behavior requires a large and diverse dataset of user actions, which can be difficult to obtain and analyze. Thus, in order to accurately simulate realistic user behavior, companies require a deep understanding of human-computer interaction, as well as advanced technical capabilities, making it a significant challenge for app performance testers.

Solution:

Automating customer user journeys is critical to ensure that applications perform optimally under different conditions. Enterprises can use automated performance testing tools to simulate user behavior and test the application's performance under different loads. You can also use real user monitoring (RUM) tools to gather data on user behavior and use this data to improve the testing process.

Read: Pros and Cons of key test automation frameworks

Challenge 3: Test on real devices and network conditions

Owing to the availability of devices and network conditions that must be taken into account, testing on real devices and networks can be difficult for businesses. It is getting difficult for enterprises to stay up with the newest trends as there are more devices available with different operating systems, screen sizes, and resolutions. In addition, the location and type of network being utilized can significantly impact network parameters, including bandwidth, latency, and packet loss. To test and analyze apps, businesses must spend money on a range of genuine devices, which can be expensive. Ensuring that the app or software is compatible with all devices and network conditions is time-consuming and requires thorough testing and analysis. Enterprises need to have a well-defined testing strategy to ensure that the software functions correctly across all devices and network conditions, which can be challenging.

Solution: 

To ensure that applications perform optimally across different devices and network conditions, companies need to test them on a wide range of devices and network configurations. The best way to perform such testing is to get the support of a testing platform that has real devices deployed in various parts of the world under different networks. This will help enterprises to gather data on the performance of their applications in real-time.

Also read: What Are Some of The Best Practices for Application Performance Testing?

Challenge 4: Integrating performance testing into the development process

Integrating performance testing into the app development cycle is difficult for companies for various reasons. Primarily, it requires a significant investment of time and resources to properly test an app's performance, which can deaccelerate the development process. Companies often depend on complex and distributed systems that make it difficult to accurately identify performance issues, as they can originate from multiple sources. Also, there is often a lack of standardization in the development process, with different teams and departments following their own workflows, making it tough to implement a consistent approach to performance testing. Apart from all other challenges, owing to the rapid pace of technological change, performance testing tools and techniques are constantly evolving, thus requiring businesses to update their testing practices to keep up continually.

Solution: 

To ensure that a company's application performs optimally, they need to integrate performance testing into the development process. This means that companies need to instruct their teams to start testing early in the development process and continue testing throughout the development cycle. Companies can use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools to automate the testing process and ensure that their application meets performance requirements.

Check out: Choosing a Test Automation Tool - A Complete Guide

How HeadSpin Helps Enterprises Overcome Performance Testing Challenges

With a focus on enhancing the performance of apps, HeadSpin uses its data science capabilities to improve the development and QA processes for applications and support product managers, SREs, developers, and QA engineers in delivering high-quality apps. Here are the significant features of the HeadSpin Platform that can help enterprises overcome all performance testing challenges.

1. Performance-centric App Development and Testing 

Development and testing teams can keep an eye on how their native digital apps are performing thanks to the HeadSpin Platform. Teams may incorporate input from testing teams to enhance the performance of their apps, thanks to its rich insights and continuous testing strategy. This improves the performance of the app as a whole and aids businesses in achieving particular KPIs.

2. AI-generated Actionable Insights

Organizations can enhance the functionality of their native digital apps by using the HeadSpin Platform, which offers ongoing monitoring and insights into both the functional and non-functional aspects of the apps. Organizations can collect useful information to improve the user experience of their apps by using numerous digital testing methods, such as media testing, video testing, and end-user experience testing. Teams can compare findings and constantly enhance the performance of their apps with the help of the Platform.

3. Synthetic Monitoring and Testing

Synthetic monitoring provided by the HeadSpin Platform enables businesses to find problems and bugs before they spread widely. The Platform continuously analyzes apps and automates user experiences to quickly identify possible issues and take immediate corrective action.

4. Global Remote Testing 

By providing remote end-to-end testing on real devices in over 90 locations, HeadSpin enables businesses to grow without relocating personnel. This functionality also aids in comprehending how apps behave in various settings.

Conclusion

Recessions in the economy can be very difficult for businesses that need to undergo performance testing. The resources and knowledge needed for efficient testing may be constrained by funding restrictions and labor reductions. Organizations may, however, overcome these difficulties and guarantee that their applications continue to run as efficiently as possible by putting the ideas covered in this blog into practice. Companies may efficiently and successfully manage their testing requirements even in difficult economic times by prioritizing testing efforts, adopting automation, and utilizing cloud-based resources. By doing this, they may strengthen their competitive advantage and put themselves in a position for long-term success while also maintaining the quality and dependability of their software programs.

Connect Now

FAQs

Q1. What do you understand by performance tuning?

Ans: Performance tuning is the method used in the testing of applications to identify performance bottlenecks and take steps to eliminate them.

Q2. What do you understand by distributed testing?

Ans: Distributed testing is the QA method when many users are simultaneously accessing an application from many devices for performing app testing.

Q3. What do you mean by profiling in performance testing?

‍Ans: Profiling is the process of fine-tuning the performance testing process by helping to identify the system components responsible for most of the issues related to its performance.