How to Ensure Flawless Performance of your eCommerce Application

Digital transformation has become imperative for businesses including the ones in the retail sector to remain competitive and deliver superior customer experiences. The growth in eCommerce has seen a phenomenal increase in the past few years with customers taking to online shopping with vengeance. According to statistics, eCommerce has seen a quantum jump from $1336 billion in 2014 to $4206 billion in 2020. It is further expected to reach $6542 billion by 2023 (Source Statista.) Since so much is riding on these companies, they should ensure the customer experience to remain top-notch. And when it comes to delivering superior customer experiences, a host of factors lies behind. These include performance, throughput, seamless navigability, attractive images galleries, and strong and secure payment gateways, among others.

Of late, eCommerce companies have entered into the domain of mobile applications given the huge number of customers using such apps on their smartphones on the go. The convenience offered by such apps has made them highly sought-after by the customers. However, all said and done, these apps are vulnerable to both performance and security issues. Performance-wise, the apps may slow down while loading or transacting, give erroneous counts, become non-responsive across devices, and many more. On the other hand, security has arguably become the biggest issue to plague the apps. Again, if statistics are referred then the average cost of security breaches will cost economies a whopping $150 million by the end of the year 2020 (Source: Juniper Research.) So, the need of the hour for enterprises developing such applications is to invest in eCommerce performance testing.

Why eCommerce performance testing?

Since eCommerce applications have interfaces with various financial instruments like bank accounts, credit/debit cards, or digital wallets, among others, they need to be secured. Also, since these applications deal with inventory management in real-time in both B2B and B2C environments, they should be tested on various parameters. Let us understand why businesses need to employ a performance testing strategy for eCommerce applications.

# Various platforms: eCommerce applications are accessed from various device platforms such as smartphones, desktops, laptops, notebooks, and tablets. Since these devices have different hardware and software configurations, the performance of any eCommerce application will be determined on the strength and capacity of these configurations. However, with the performance testing of eCommerce applications, the seamless performance of such applications can be ensured to a greater degree. And since performance is directly related to customer experience, the more the merrier.

# Different browsers: eCommerce applications contain rich images, social media plugins, product descriptions, and payment gateways, which help in converting visitors into customers. Since these applications containing such elements open in different browsers such as Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, etc., they need to function seamlessly. With a stringent performance testing exercise, any glitch preventing the smooth functioning of such applications can be identified and fixed.

# Load and stress thresholds: eCommerce applications, especially in a B2C environment, handle a lot of traffic during certain times of the year – black Friday sales, Christmas sales etc. If their performance during such times of high traffic goes down the customer experience invariably takes a hit and brands end up earning flak for themselves. Further, the functionality of such applications can often be affected by the customer-friendly designs (read rich images,) which can only be validated through eCommerce application testing. The testing would confirm whether the functionality of an eCommerce application performs to its optimum when the traffic is very high or there are issues related to network or slow server speed. A robust performance testing approach can bring about parity between customer-friendly designs and performance of the application during extreme load conditions.

# Fixing glitches: In the highly competitive business environment of today where customer experience is arguably the best differentiator, ensuring the performance of an application is critical. If an eCommerce application is delivered to the market without proper testing then the resident glitches can play havoc. In addition to affecting the performance of the application in terms of lowered throughput, navigability, functionality, or usability, they can cause security issues. For example, any vulnerability within the application can be exploited by hackers to steal sensitive financial information like credit card or bank account details. The customers can end up losing money – a distinct possibility. So, if proper security and eCommerce performance testing in the Agile-DevOps mould are implemented in the SDLC, the glitches can be identified and fixed early.

# Brand equity: A glitch-prone eCommerce application can discredit a brand when dissatisfied customers vent their anger in the form of lawsuits or negative reviews. And when the entire strategy of businesses revolves around popularizing the brand, such a situation of losing brand equity can come as a big jolt. It is only through implementing performance testing that businesses can avoid getting hit in terms of brand equity.

What performance testing strategy should be followed?

Testers should consider the below-mentioned factors while planning eCommerce performance testing.

Performance across geographies: Ecommerce applications are accessed by customers across the length and breadth of a country or even continents. Testers should ensure the performance of such applications is not affected by the geographic location of the customers. This involves testing the key workflows and functionalities.

Page loading speed: It is said that most customers (around 57% as per stats) tend to discard an application if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. E-retailers should ensure that the page load speed of their eCommerce applications should not suffer, especially during peak traffic. Using eCommerce load testing, QA specialists can validate the performance of an application by creating virtualized users across geographies, device platforms, and networks.

The steps involved in conducting performance testing are:

·       Building a test environment

·       Selecting the performance metrics to be tested

·       Writing the test automation script, selecting the tool, and execute

·       Reviewing the test result

Conclusion

With growing digitization of enterprises, especially of retail, the usage of eCommerce applications will only grow further. To ensure their performance remains top-notch and security intact, they should be subjected to extensive performance testing. This is important to retain customer trust and enhance brand equity.

The importance of Load Testing

The latest software applications need to be compatible across a plethora of digital platforms. These include devices, operating systems, browsers, frameworks, third-party APIs, and networks. However, the success of such applications can only be ensured if they are able to function seamlessly across the above-mentioned digital elements or channels for peak load conditions. In other words, the applications should perform accurately and without any issues (latency, downtime, etc) should they be subjected to specific load patterns. However, to ensure the software performs to its optimum capacity when faced with extreme loads, it should undergo load testing.

What is load testing?

As non-functional testing, it is carried out to find out the behavior of a software application under specific load threshold. A software application load testing helps to determine a system’s behavior during normal and peak traffic conditions. For example, during Black Friday sales in the West, people throng retail or eCommerce stores in droves. And unless these systems have undergone load testing, they can get overwhelmed leading to system latency, downtime, or worse, crashes. This type of application performance testing is meant to check an application’s performance in the event of a large number of users trying to access it at the same time.

What does application load testing tell us?

The following outcomes can be determined by subjecting an application to load testing.

·       Identify if the hosting infrastructure is sufficient to run the application.

·       Find if the application is able to perform to its optimum when subjected to its peak user load.

·       Verify the number of simultaneous users the application can handle. Also, evaluate the hardware configuration, network capacity, and other considerations the application may require to function optimally.

·       Identify the specific element in the application that is causing the deterioration in performance. For example, in the event of an increase in user count, the testing would throw light on the quantum of memory and processor usage, and response time for network bandwidth.

Benefits of load performance testing

To ensure software applications perform to their optimum when maximum number of users try to access them at the same time, they should undergo rigorous load testing. The benefits to accrue from such a type of performance testing include:

Stimulation of real-time user scenarios: It is important to know how an application, website, or API shall behave when accessed by a large number of users at a given point in time. It is needed to prevent situations like system latency, downtime, or crashes, which have the potential to mar customer experience and confidence. Simulating real user scenarios can help in identifying bugs or understanding bottlenecks that may impact the application when put to real use.

Measurement of the quality of product or service: Application performance testing measures the quality of a product or service as per the user behavior. Testers using tools like LoadRunner, Blitz, BlazeMeter, CloudTest, and Apache JMeter evaluate an app or website’s performance under actual load conditions. Also, the testing exercise monitors the throughput of servers, memory, CPU, and other hardware elements when subjected to extreme load thresholds.

Analysis of key performance parameters: Testers, through application load testing, can identify a slew of performance parameters. These include throughput, response time per transaction, delay in network between server response and client request, or design issues. Further, configuration issues like database server, application server, web server, memory limitation, and CPU maximization are identified.

Improved scalability: This type of performance testing helps testers to find out the actual quantum of load that an application, web portal, or server can support. The information can be of great help when developers need to scale up the infrastructure as per the changing business demand. Besides, in order to preempt special load scenarios like Black Friday, music festivals, or sporting events witnessing a surge in traffic, testers can perform special load testing.

Prevention of application failure: Any application may contain a hidden glitch, which, if not identified and mitigated in time, can lead to its failure. Such failures can manifest themselves when the load is beyond the capacity of the application to handle. This is where load testing can help by detecting such issues early on in the SDLC. If not, such failures can incur huge costs for organizations and impact their brands adversely.

Conclusion

Load testing can help an organization to evaluate the capacity of an application or website. It ensures user satisfaction in the case of a surge in traffic and renders superior performance for the software. This type of testing should be made a part of the usual QA process to preempt software failure.

How to address the Performance Testing challenges of IoT

The digital age aka industry 4.0 has been redefined by intelligent solutions that are merging the digital and physical worlds across verticals. These intelligent solutions are leveraged by organizations to enhance scalability, enable customization, realize efficiencies, improve customer experience, and achieve ROI. The Internet of Things or IoT technology is driving synergies between smart machines, industrial processes, and software applications. This requires organizations to build end-to-end systems with enhanced capabilities, driving outcomes such as product enhancement, innovation through collaboration, greater operational visibility, better equipment performance, and quicker decision making - all based on contextual data obtained in real-time.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects smart devices to the internet using sensors. It also connects such devices to digital technologies constituting big data, artificial intelligence, and wireless networks. The main objective of establishing such a network is to collate and share intelligence among devices without any human intervention. The data obtained from IoT helps organizations to analyze their digital ecosystem and pre-empt equipment malfunction, downtime, and other glitches. It gives them insights into the performance of products and how they are utilized by the users. The insights can be leveraged to enhance the differentiating features of products, create value chains, and build new business models to drive growth.

IoT helps organizations to

• Track and monitor assets in real-time with respect to their performance and availability
• Analyze data from sensors for predictive maintenance
• Take critical business decisions
• Generate greater efficiency, enhance safety and customer experience and create new business models and revenue streams

However, IoT can present a host of challenges, especially concerning performance testing.

Challenges in application performance testing of IoT devices

• Increased complexity: Since data communication takes place between smart devices such as televisions, air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, or smartphones, they need to be considered for performance testing. However, the plethora of devices can increase the level of complexity while drawing a specific performance testing strategy. Also, recording data from mobile devices, and web browsers, among others by using a load tester is relatively easy compared to testing the above-mentioned devices without changing their settings.
• Tackling the impact of factors: In IoT, factors such as network bandwidth, load, latency, or packet loss, among others can be critical when it comes to executing application performance testing. For example, if the above-mentioned factors are not tested for a web or mobile application, the same may crash.
• Stateless operation: Typical software applications are connected through a sequence of steps aka context or state. However, since IoT sensors do not follow any well-defined context, the IoT applications ought to manage such context or state elements.
•  Diverse device interfaces: With changes in IoT devices and the addition of new ones with different connection protocols and data formats, the performance testing methodology needs to change as well. This is because every new addition would require the execution of performance testing. 
• Absence of subjective feedback: In most testing procedures, data can be inserted to test the effectiveness of UI or response time. However, the same cannot be provided by the IoT networks.

The performance testing approach to tackle the challenges?

To begin with, testers should prioritize test cases, especially the key areas that can take the longest testing time. Testers must understand to choose such areas as the consequences of performance issues can be devastating for some businesses compared to the rest. Also, given the fact that a great deal of standardization has taken place in the technology field, the testers should ensure their compliance while providing performance testing services. Any updates being pushed for these devices would present challenges of security and usability. The core functionality of IoT devices should include monitoring their current status as they are connected to a network 24x7.

Implementing IoT can include devices that do not have IoT in them. These may include communication networks, instrumentation, and storage, among others. The complexity of such devices and the lack of an IoT label would require testers to first understand how the pieces would fit in the jigsaw. Thereafter, testers should streamline the complexity and communicate the importance of each device and make it work.

Conclusion

The efficient way of driving the performance of an IoT based application is to implement a robust testingplan. It should be followed by determining the peak load factor faced by the device at any point in time. The testers should use appropriate testing tools to validate performance efficiently. By implementing performance testing, businesses can integrate IoT in their processes and achieve success.

This article is already published on medium.com.