From laggy performance to straight-up crashes and extended outages, we’ve all experienced our fair share of problems shopping online. And as the mad rush of the holiday season reaches its climax, eCommerce companies nationwide are facing a familiar foe: stress under load. Is automated load/performance testing the ultimate gift for these beleaguered IT departments?
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In the last year alone, an estimated 244 million people browsed or made purchases online—a large percentage of which did so during the holiday season. |
Picture this.
It’s December 21st, and you’re sitting on your favorite armchair. It’s been a long day. Despite the fact that everyone should be off for the year by now, the office was a mad house—and the frigid and blustery weather that greeted you on the way out has chilled you to the bone. Licking your wounds, you sip on a glass of nutmeg-scented eggnog that may or may not have a shot of two of brown liquor in it. (Hey, no judgement here—‘tis the season.) The warm fire spits and crackles, and you draw your glass to your face and inhale deeply—filling your nose with a pleasant perfume of charred wood, warm baking spices, and the fortified punch of alcohol. You slump further into your chair—slowly lulling into an ever-deepening holiday hypnosis.
And then it hits you. It’s less than four days until Christmas—and you still haven’t bought your mother a gift. Jarred awake, you boot up your tablet and frantically load up the first eCommerce site that pops into your mind—scrambling to find the right present while praying that you can still get it in time. Then you find it—the perfect gift. You add it to your cart and try to check out—only to watch your transaction fail as the site tries in vain to process your request. Again and again you try, only to come up empty each and every time. Fuming, you pour yourself another glass of eggnog. “It’s going to be a long night,” you mutter to yourself as you open another site—praying that this one doesn’t crash on you.
Does that sound familiar? You’re not alone. In fact, it’s probably happened (or is going to happen) to most of us this season as well. The culprit, you ask? A lack of load/performance testing—coupled with too much of a good thing.
In the last year alone, an estimated 244 million people browsed or made purchases online—a large percentage of which did so during the holiday season. At first glance, that seems like great news for eCommerce. After all, high traffic generally means high sales. But at the same time, that spike in traffic also poses considerable risk: the website slowing down—or straight up crashing—under heavy stress.
Like any computer program, websites can struggle under heavy loads. As multiple users flood the bandwidth or resources of a system, it can significantly impact its ability to respond to users’ requests. The holiday season is notorious for events like these—especially during big sales on Black Friday/Cyber Monday where users flock to a site en masse. Heck, this happened to Macy’s less than a month ago!
So, how can you prevent this from happening to your website, ERP, or business application? That’s easy—you just need to simulate your software system’s performance under load (or, as we like to call it: load/performance testing). If that sounds cost-prohibitive, you’re not alone; but with test automation it’s a breeze. Admittedly, if you’re not set up for automation, it can be a bit costly to implement, but the returns often far outweigh the cost of admission. (Check out our ROI Calculator to see what I’m talking about!)
And if you’re still on the fence, consider this: for every hour a retailer’s website is down, they’ll lose about 4 percent of a day’s sales. Now imagine what that means for your company. If you’re in charge of an ERP system or business app, how much potential revenue is lost when that crashes? If you’re a brick-and mortar retailer, what does it mean when your back-end systems crash—leaving you without the ability to process payments and update inventories? What happens when the servers hosting your mobile app go down, frustrating your users and negatively impacting their loyalty?
Let’s face it: we all know we’re going to be dealing with load/performance testing issues in the coming days. And while you can’t do anything about it today, you can learn from these high-profile gaffes by ensuring that it doesn’t happen to you. So drop us a line sometime and learn about our test automation solutions for load/performance testing. Even if you’re not looking to buy and just want a bit of sage advice, we’ve got you covered.
We’ll even bring the eggnog—and your brown liquor of choice.
Cheers,
Mike Hodge
Lighthouse Technologies, Inc.
Software Testing | Quality Assurance Consulting | Oracle EBS Consulting
