Performance testing is an important part of any enterprise software development and deployment process. Running performance tests helps ensure that applications will work as expected when deployed to production under real-world loads. Here are 6 key benefits of enterprise performance testing into your enterprise IT strategy:
- Identify Performance Bottlenecks Before Launch
Performance testing helps uncover system bottlenecks like overloaded servers, bandwidth constraints, database connection exhaustion, and memory leaks before an application is launched. By load testing early in the software development life cycle, teams can proactively diagnose and resolve these performance deficiencies. This prevents a poor user experience on launch day due to slow response times, latency issues, downtime, or application crashes. Essentially, performance testing pinpoints problems so they can be fixed pre-launch.
- Ensure Scalability for Future Growth
Load testing is critical for confirming that your infrastructure and applications can gracefully handle future business growth. You can simulate increasing users, transactions, and data to identify the breaking points where performance starts to suffer. This enables proactive planning to scale out servers, expand network capacity, optimize code, and implement caching to meet rising demand. Performance testing provides the visibility to confirm your architecture will scale smoothly over time. It allows you to identify and remedy scalability bottlenecks before they impact real users as your business grows.
- Validate Infrastructure Sizing
Performance testing is invaluable for validating infrastructure sizing decisions. When deploying to new servers, networks and databases, you need to confirm that capacity planning was done correctly. By simulating projected workloads, you can verify that the allocated hardware resources are sufficient to deliver great performance across the application ecosystem. Load testing reduces guesswork, showing definitively whether your chosen configuration can handle anticipated traffic volumes and throughput needs. It provides data to either confirm your sizing is adequate or underscore the need to provision larger capacity.
- Compare Performance of Application Versions
As you roll out new releases and updates to software, conducting comparative testing helps detect performance regressions versus older versions. You don’t want new features or optimizations in one area to inadvertently create bottlenecks in other parts of the system. Regression testing provides assurance that performance doesn’t degrade from release to release.
- Meet SLAs for Critical Business Systems
For revenue-generating applications and core business systems, load tests help confirm that performance SLAs and response time thresholds will be met when applications move into production. Testing enables you to catch SLA violations ahead of time so that issues can be addressed before rollout.
- Optimize End-to-End User Experience
Beyond just measuring raw backend speeds and feeds, you can execute synthetic user scenarios during load tests to simulate real-world user interactions. This provides insight into real end-user performance and helps identify usability issues that may not be caught by component-level testing. Optimizing user journeys improves customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
In today’s digital business environment, application performance directly impacts revenue and brand perception. By making enterprise performance testing standard practice throughout development and deployment, IT organizations can deliver optimal speed and reliability for business-critical systems. Testing provides the visibility required to proactively identify and resolve issues before they disrupt real users. But you need a reliable test automation company like Opkey for comprehensive testing.
Opkey is a leading no-code test platform that provides an innovative enterprise-grade test automation solution that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical teams. Its drag-and-drop interface allows for quick and easy creation of automated performance tests without coding. Functional tests can be converted to performance tests with a single click, eliminating duplicate test maintenance. Opkey supports performance testing across various application types and use cases. It encourages collaboration and efficient work across diverse teams through a single integrated interface.
