Performance testing survival tips for #BlackFriday
Is your website or mobile app prepared for the high volumes of
traffic expected on Black Friday (and
Cyber Monday)? Be ready with these performance testing tips
from Ferdinand Nell, lead Consultant, Test
Automation/Performance Testing at DVT Global Testing
Solutions.
The 24th November 2018 is the official day for Black Friday,
the day after Thanksgiving (Friday) in North America and takes
place in countries all around the world, including South
Africa.
While it may seem like months away, this favourite annual
online shopping day is the cause of many sites and apps to
crash leaving consumers disappointed and social media buzzing.
According to Nell, too many companies do not prepare for the
high volume of traffic to hit their website on the day. As an
example, the retailer Takealot revealed to MyBroadband that it
saw a record number of visits to its site on Black Friday in
2017, with over 2.2 million hits.
However, in November 2017 a handful of South Africa’s largest
e-commerce websites crashed or experienced erratic behaviour on
#BlackFriday. Websites and apps were temporarily down due to
overwhelming volumes. Headlines like ‘The glitch that stole
Christmas: Black Friday crashes online stores in SA’ hit the
news.
Nell points out that there are specific steps businesses can
take to ensure that their sales run smoothly on Black Friday
plus to avoid brand reputational damage. “Performance testing
your website and app are essential to prevent any bottlenecks
and to identify potential application issues that may surface
under extreme conditions.”
Performance testing allows you to validate your application
capacity such that it performs under various loads and
conditions. Nell suggests the following performance testing
practices to avoid brand embarrassment or loss of revenue:
1. Obtain a Baseline, then Benchmark and Repeat
- Identify Business as Usual processes and typical user load
over a period of time.
- Develop a suite of performance tests to simulate that and
obtain a baseline.
- Execute those tests whenever changes are made to the
underlying system and compare your results with that of your
baseline.
- Understand how your system reacts to load and what affects
performance.
2. Find the Ceiling – Stress Testing
Use your BAU performance suite to drive ever-increasing load
against your system in order to determine the point at which:
- Functional errors appear.
- Performance degrades to unacceptable levels.
3. System Endurance – Soak Testing
Determine the behaviour of your system during prolonged use;
garbage collection, SQL cursors, storage space etc. have a
tendency to only illustrate potential problems over time.
4. Brace for Impact – Risk Mitigation
Determine the stress points of the system and identify points
of failure.
Plan for failover and mitigate risk around those areas by:
- Increasing hardware capacity.
- Optimising system configuration and load balancing
strategies.
- Enhancing solution and architectural design.
5. Verify Your Solution
Rerun your performance tests to the point where they failed
previously and confirm that your solutions have been effective.
6. Extrapolation and the Production Question
Extrapolation is a useful tool for determining the theoretical
performance capability of a particular environment by scaling
the results obtained from another.
Let’s assume performance baselines were obtained on the QA
environment. If, for arguments sake, one has determined that,
on paper, Production has 5 times the effective server capacity
of QA, then one can expect Production to handle up to 5 times
the concurrent user load that was generated on QA – give or
take 15%.
Naturally, real world results may differ, but this provides a
starting point from which further verification can take place.
If you still need convincing that performance testing is
critical to your ecommerce site, here are a few stats from last
year’s Black Friday sales to make you think:
- Amazon’s Black Friday 2017 sales hit a record high of $2.4B
across its three major sites in the US, UK and Germany.
- In a report released by Adobe, Cyber Monday hit a new
record of $6.59 billion in sales, making it the largest U.S.
online shopping day ever.
- Online sales volume on the Black Friday shopping day grew
24% year-over-year, according to data from Salesforce’s retail
intelligence unit.
- According to Salesforce 42% of Black Friday orders were
placed on a smartphone, and only 49% on a desktop or laptop
computer. That marks the first year that computers generated
less than half of all online orders.
What is apparent is that Black Friday is now a global
e-commerce phenomenon and a day of massive potential for online
retailers. Can you afford to miss out and have your brand name
shamed? If your answer is no, then look at consulting with
performance testing experts so that your business can reap the
benefits.
Resources:
Takealot reveals Black Friday revenue, BusinessTech, 27
November 2017, https://businesstech.co.za/news/internet/213351/takealot-reveals-black-friday-revenue
Black Friday Online Sales Surge to New Records With Mobile
Pushing Fastest, Fortune.com, 26 November 2017,
http://fortune.com/2017/11/26/black-friday-online-2017-sales-record/
Market Beyond, 29 November 2017, https://themarketbeyond.com/black-friday-now-global-e-commerce-phenomenon/
Cyber Monday Hits New Record At $6.6 Billion, Forbes.com, 28
November 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2017/11/28/report-cyber-monday-hits-new-record-at-6-6-billion-over-1-billion-more-than-2016/#629b2a233662
This article was published in partnership with DVT.
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