Whether you’re developing a smartphone application, web game, or a new desktop software, being able to test how it will perform on a web server is a crucial part of releasing a stable and enjoyable product. Failure to test for performance will undoubtedly lead to a long list of errors, complaints, and an overall poor reception from users who will find your product to be to inferior to other solutions that use performance testing tools to ensure a positive user experience. With that said, here are four reasons why every developer should be using a performance testing tool:
1. Ensuring Optimal Responsiveness
One of the biggest reasons to use a powerful performance testing tool is to ensure that the app is responding quickly and appropriately to all requests sent from any kind of device. Nowadays, users don’t have the time nor the patience to sit around and wait while your app lags on loading pages and/or fails to respond altogether. By testing performance with a program like WebLOAD you can gather detailed statistics pertaining to response time and other factors that are essential for maintaining optimal responsiveness.
2. Securing Stability
Stability is all about making sure your app works the same way every time and does the same thing on every platform. Performance testing tools help you recognize inconsistencies and errors that could affect app stability, thereby giving you a solid foundation to base your upcoming updates on. When you operate based on statistical data rather than just first-hand experience alone, you’ll have a much more encompassing view of what needs to be fixed and how.
3. Improving Reliability
Performance testing will give you an idea of how much of a load your app can handle before loading times start to slow down or the app crashes altogether. Being able to measure and circumvent such shortcomings prevents you from dealing with catastrophic downtime that could result in a huge loss of users and damage to the app’s reputation of being reliable. Nobody likes an app that only works sometimes.
4. Allowing for Scalability
Performance testing lets you discover how many users can access your app at one time before problems arise. By helping you recognize your limits and surpass them, these tools make it possible to scale up to much higher usage levels based on solid analytical data.
Put Yourself in the User’s Shoes After Every Update
In addition to using a performance testing tool to gather detailed technical information about your app’s usage, it also helps to imagine every possible scenario in which someone would be able to use your app, and then manually test the user experience of each scenario yourself. For example, if your app is compatible with Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac OS X, then you would need to make sure everything is running smoothly on all of those platforms each time there is a major update to either your software or the operating system. Sometimes analytical tools won’t reveal certain bugs in the user experience, so it’s up to you to test these things manually on an ongoing basis.
