Retail e-commerce application performance testing best practices to follow in 2019

Introduction

For any business trying to optimize the digital experience of its customers, the work is not just limited to maximizing page loading time.

The software testers are focusing now more on complete performance testing services of the website, and for this, they are using a multi-layered approach.

It is better than the average load and stress testing methods to achieve better user experience.

We shall elaborate here some best performance testing practices to enable readers to take broader challenges and not get limited to regular software testing.

To Build a Fool Proof Test Strategy!

To be able to perfect the application, it is best to start with a comprehensive list of the type of tests to perform.

The work involves proper planning and preparation before one can think of execution.

To understand the experiment better, you must try to visualize user expectations from the system to be able to understand the relevance of the tests.

The tests are considered best designed if done close to the real-life user environment.

Include Think Time in Testing!

When a user is working with the application, the time pause taken by him gets measured as Think Time.

It occurs when a user stops to understand the information on the screen while they are switching from one section to other or when they surf around using their understanding to complete the purchase.

For example, a customer stopping to check for the address, phone no or credit card details, etc is an example of think time.

While finalizing the test scripts for think time, it gets fixed as the time between to back to back requests, or it can be the time between a minimum or maximum values.

Identify Performance Bottleneck!

Irrespective of the fact whether you are an expert tester or a novice, it is difficult to guess when the next performance challenge will come up.

So, whenever an issue comes up, start focussing on individual components to understand the problem better instead to concentrating on the full module.

It may take more time, but in the long run, will save money as well as efforts.

Use Past Experiences to Learn!

Whenever any performance issue comes up, it takes some time to understand the problem.

So, it is always better to do the testing under same working conditions every time, to be able to check if the issue gets resolved or not.

The persistent observations will enable you to develop your checking system for performance issues.

It works best to learn from your own testing decisions and use that to resolve issues.

Focus on Baseline Tests!

Any performance testing project involves proper time management.

The baseline tests are essential as most of the problems get determined during these tests only, saving a lot of time required for full load tests.

In the course of baseline tests, experiences testers can identify and separate most of the problems.

If not done at this stage, it will be quite challenging to identify and isolate them at a later stage.

Conclusion

With above insight on the best practices to be followed while designing and executing testing of the eCommerce websites, here are few final thoughts.

A website needs to work fine with desired responsiveness on computers as well as mobile apps.

The e-Commerce testing must focus on optimizing the database so that the ETL processes maintain a data warehouse to support OLAP and BI.

In the end, the effectiveness of an eCommerce website depends on the conversion rate, which means the percentage of customers that transact on the site among the ones that visit it.

While testing, we need to check the effectiveness of one change compared to others in improving this conversion rate.

For this reason, A/B testing and the usability engineering practices are gaining more importance in this field these days.