You can spend months building an app, and have it run like an absolute dream (on your brand new phone, while you’re sitting right next to the wifi router in your living room!) Its not true for every app of course, but for many that blinding speed is a total illusion. The second you launch it to the public and five hundred people try to make an order, the whole thing can completely collapse. That means you don’t really know if your software actually works until it gets hit with a massive wave of stressed out people tapping the checkout button at the exact same time.
What actually happens behind the scenes
A lot of people think testing is just opening a menu on a laptop to see if the pictures of the products load properly but that isnt what this is about at all. Performance testing is essentially throwing a virtual hurricane at your website to see what breaks first and how ugly it gets when it does. Why do so many massive retail brands still launch a huge bank holiday sale without checking if their servers can actually handle the traffic?! It makes you look like a total amateur when your customers get a blank white error screen just because a few extra people logged in. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope for the best when actual money is on the line.
Getting someone else to break it- top 5
You probably shouldn’t test your own stuff because you know exactly how it is supposed to work, and you won’t do the weird and completely illogical things that a real customer will do. There are actual businesses out there who do this professionally so you don’t have to guess. If you need a top five, check out:
-TestingXperts
These are massive and have teams everywhere across the globe
-ScienceSoft
Another one that handles really heavy, complicated enterprise software for big firms
-Testfort
These have around forever and they basically just torture your software until it cries.
They’re really good at stepping in and aggressively simulating huge spikes in users to figure out exactly where the bottlenecks are hiding before your actual customers find them.
-QA Mentor
These round out the top five if you just need an army of people to try and break your checkout process by doing things you never expected.
Fixing the mess
Paying an external company to tell you your app is terrible sounds like a massive waste of money until you realise how much cash you lose when a customer gets bored. They will just go to a rival website instead and spend their money there. Research has shown time and time again if a webpage takes longer than three seconds to load, people will click away and often never try to return. You have to find out what the technical limits are and fix them before launch day. Spending a bit of budget upfront to make sure the buy button actually works on payday is the only way to keep your sanity intact!
