The growing increase in embracing digitization has enabled the penetration of newer technologies among the masses and this has brought in a paradigm shift in the expectation and usage of mobile and web applications. Previously the goal was to make sure the overall functionality was to be intact, whereas now with the growing competition and increase in the expectations of users are, the mobile apps must be user-friendly and also ensure the application can perform simultaneous operations without any glitches. Performance-related issues during these applications’ usage can cost customer confidence and lose out to your competitors.  

Non-functional attributes such as security, accessibility, and performance have now become a top priority as they play a significant role in an app’s market acceptance. Also, on the performance testing front, mobile app performance can no longer purely rely on the core client-server performance testing done at the application level. A robust performance testing strategy must address various aspects from user-facing GUI, load and stress performance under high traffic, speed, reliability, security, etc., right from the early stages of the software development. 

Understanding the difference between Performance Testing and Functional Testing

The key difference between the two is that the functional testing focuses on ensuring the application is working as per the requirements, whereas, performance testing examines the performance and behavior of the application under various conditions such as heavy user load, peak usage times, low battery, bad network coverage, low available memory, simultaneous access to application’s servers by several users and more. Thus performance testing helps to understand how your innovative application works at different loads, to know its breaking point, and take necessary steps in making your application robust. 

Why Choose Metrics Driven Performance Testing for Mobile & Web App Development? 

Metrics in performance testing are crucial to estimate the performance and behavior of a particular web, mobile or software application like endurance, breaking point, peak usage times, ability to simultaneously complete the operations and etc. Usually, the metrics obtained during this performance testing are represented in a visually rich and intelligent dashboard. The goal of metrics-driven performance testing is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the application and to help make better decisions in product development and its maintenance by offering reliable data. 

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Some of the key metrics that must be focused on while performance testing mobile and web applications are: 

  • Response time – is the time required to trigger a request and receive a response 
  • Wait time- otherwise known as average latency, gives information on the time required to obtain the first byte after a request is sent 
  • Average load time- is the average time required in delivering every request and this is a key indicator of quality from a user’s standpoint 
  • Peak response time- is a measurement of the longest time required to fulfill a request and a large difference between this and the average will create problems 
  • Error rate Software Testing- is a rate of requests that results in errors to that of the rest and they occur when the load exceeds the capacity 
  • Concurrent users- also known as load size is a key measure of load that tells about the active users at any point 
  • Requests per second is a metric that gives about the number of requests that are handled 
  • Transactions passed/failed- this metric highlights the total numbers of successful or unsuccessful requests 
  • Throughput- shows the amount of bandwidth used during the test and is usually measured in kilobytes per second 
  • CPU utilization- is the time required by the CPU needs to process requests 
  • Memory utilization- is the memory required to process a particular request 

 This is just the beginning and a high-level overview of performance testing for Web and mobile applications. Making performance testing a significant part of your development process at an early stage is the key to overcome the performance challenges of mobile and web applications. Also to stay ahead of your growing competitors in the market space and avoid big failures in real work conditions, apart from the functional aspects, application developers must focus on the performance and continually work upon the insights obtained from the metrics of performance testing. 

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