In 2014, customers of popular banks like RBS, Barclays, Natwest, and Santander lost access to their mobile apps on payday for hours because heavy traffic eventually crashed the system. Consequently, the disappointed customers launched their grievances on Twitter, destroying the banks’ reputations.
The crashing of the apps indicates that the apps weren’t properly tested for scalability. So when there were more users than usual, the server couldn’t handle the numerous requests. Issues like this arise when there are mistakes in SaaS performance testing. Many companies and organizations have had their reputations sullied on social media and web pages by disappointed customers, like bank customers.
Let’s discuss some of these mistakes and how to avoid them to ensure excellent customer experience and maintain and improve your company’s reputation.
But first, let’s start with what SaaS performance testing entails.
Saas performance testing is a vital strategy that evaluates a product’s real-time ability to handle KPIs, including traffic, speed, and clients. A thorough test helps development teams maintain steady progress, identify, and fix mistakes quicker to deliver valuable products in record time.
Unfortunately, most companies still disregard the importance of these tests and assume it’s a “one last thing to do” before launch. If you let this happen, your displeased customers will send delayed load time and system error complaints you could have handled during testing.
So, to prevent your customers from facing trivial app bugs, let’s see some of these mistakes in SaaS performance testing one should avoid.
Insufficient test coverage happens when there isn’t enough test data for every user story. To get adequate test coverage, you must understand how each feature works, its limitations, justifications, and supporting capabilities.
As soon as you have defined the holistic test coverage, review each feature you should test to identify its function, characteristics, and scope of the anticipated features. Then you can start writing test cases for each component depending on the user stories.
Ensure that the SaaS tests are done simultaneously as code writing. This way, you can verify every stage of the features as soon as they are released. Also, ensure that you develop enough data from tests for every essential type and stage of testing.
A test management tool like aqua records the data from test cases to give you the maximum test coverage.
Interestingly, neglecting real conditions is a standard error in regular assessments. To create that “perfect” software, some development teams often set unrealistic user pacing delays.
Some people load their apps with requests in the high hundreds and thousands every second, completely ignoring ‘think time’ and then worrying about a delayed response time.
If the expectations were practical, you would know that no real-world user will randomly make hundreds of page requests every second. So while you want to build a top-performing product, note the distinctions in how real customers will likely interact with your product.
Suppose you only test your app over a corporate local area network (LAN). It may be acceptable if all your users use your app with the LAN. However, if your customers use your app with a 3G or 4G network, that SaaS test data will not be accurate.
That is because a 30 millisecond lag time on a medium-load server with a 3G network often translates to a 10 to 20 seconds delay on a local area network.
This happens because the server continues creating available ports to handle customer requests, which could strain a server. During your performance tests, tools like aqua demonstrate various network speeds and test environments for different user groups to give you accurate and holistic data.
Test automation offers a realistic setting for a complete assessment. To assess your app’s load strength for users with mobile devices, you may have to use real and virtual devices.
The testers will simulate extra load on the server with the virtual mobile users, then test the overall user experience on the actual mobile devices. The simulation will help you understand your mobile users and their potential network traffic, network conditions, and your server’s responses to increased latency, reduced bandwidth, and packet loss.
Ultimately, prioritizing SaaS automation tools offer limitless load-testing ideas for user performance and server challenges.
While we often emphasize site speed and quicker response, sometimes, some scripting blunders, if overlooked, may compromise the security of an app. Although they may not be as continuous as other prioritized metrics, they indicate underlying problems even when every other part of the system appears excellent.
For example, while the response time may be superb, seemingly trivial and rare stack overflow oversights could indicate possible problems. Avoid these SaaS testing blunders with aqua QA management tool. aqua reports will show you if your requirements were tested enough before they are released to provide safe and secure software.
Although a system crash is arguably the most problematic occurrence, there are some other T’s you may want to cross; for example, the end-user view.
Review how your clients will interact with your app as realistically as possible. A functional test mid-load will show that while the strained server could seem like it’s taking the load, the user side may be indicating error signals.
Longevity tests also show if your software takes user or server-side memory during extended tests. So you can review how your system consumes resources and identify errors before any system downtime.
Despite the general misconception, the scalability test does not exactly mean overloading the server with numerous requests on a single load injection node. For a thorough scalability test, begin with minimal customer numbers, then steadily top the numbers mid-test and monitor your app’s response with increased load.
You may begin with ten users. Evaluate the feedback for a couple of minutes and set your performance yardstick. Then increase the number by an extra ten every minute to 100 and continue until you identify the number where your website crashes.
SaaS performance testing provides data for companies to visualize an app’s real-time feedback and inform strategic modifications before the software’s completion and launch.
To ensure the test data you collect is accurate, avoid the mistakes in tech companies performance testing with aqua’s intuitive yet comprehensive QA management tool.
Our robust testing features ensure you save time and resources during development stages, ensuring you launch only top-performing applications.
Contact us today!
Recent research has revealed that a Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) group, tracked as "GruesomeLarch"…
Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has disrupted a significant phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation run by Egypt-based…
The Russian threat group TAG-110, linked to BlueDelta (APT28), is actively targeting organizations in Central…
Earth Kasha, a threat actor linked to APT10, has expanded its targeting scope to India,…
Raspberry Robin, a stealthy malware discovered in 2021, leverages advanced obfuscation techniques to evade detection…
Critical infrastructure, the lifeblood of modern society, is under increasing threat as a new report…