There are a plethora of moving parts when running software within a business, especially when your app is the main revenue generator for your business model. Whether you’re an app developer who specializes in addictive games or a retail site with a powerful shopping application, you need to know that your app can handle whatever the user throws at it.
Load testing is one of the ways you can keep your app running smoothly. In this article, we’ll discover what load testing is and how it reflects on your monetization efforts.
What is Load Testing?
In simple terms, load testing is “performance testing that simulates real-world load on any software, application, or website.” (source: stackify.com) The process ultimately determines whether your app will stand up to the fluctuating demands of the user, ensuring consistency no matter how many people are using the app. Load testing should evaluate how the app runs during low and peak times.
Load testing is comparable to competition testing for a competitive weightlifter. It assesses the overall performance before going to launch. In software, this focus is on loading times, app flow, and other performance metrics, ensuring that everything is going to plan before the big day.
How Load Testing Differs from Stress Testing
For software testing, stress testing can be compared to performance testing in the manufacturing of barbells for competitive weightlifting. Before a barbell is shipped out to a trainer or gym, the manufacturer needs to ensure that it maintains its structural integrity regardless of if the bar is empty or if the bar is loaded with 1000lbs of weight. The bar will be put through the ringer to ensure that it flexes without breaking and returns to its previous form once the weight is removed.
The same protocol applies to software load testing. Will your shopping app function the same on Black Friday as it does on a random Monday throughout the year? Furthermore, will it return to its original functionality without problems after the influx of customers has dispersed? Both load and stress testing are essential for monetized applications.
How Load Testing Impacts Monetization
The correlation between load testing and monetization is evident, even for those outside the software development industry. Developers are tasked with finding the optimum performance level for their app to be profitable. Not only does that mean testing the performance to ensure the user experience is enjoyable enough that they’ll convert to a sale, but also that there aren’t too many resources being dedicated to performance that all revenue is going directly back into the app.
Load testing will also impact those who have an advertising-based revenue model, rather than making direct sales through an app. They will need to test how the various integrations for advertisers impact the functionality of the app, and what the app’s threshold is for various forms of advertisements. This will indicate the allowable complexity of the advertisements– a photo, a video or an in-app game demo– so that the app developer can charge accordingly for space. The developer must take a multi-faceted approach and look at the various ad components from the view of the user and the customer.
Load Testing Tools
There are plenty of load testing tools available to make this integral process easier for developers. For smaller organizations, regular load testing is a crucial component of the business that is often overlooked or set aside due to limited resources. To be able to keep your user’s attention in our fast-paced world, you need to be able to send them information in less than a second.
Using a load testing tool will tell you how quickly your site responds under different conditions, giving you a real-world view of what your customer might see. You can set up different scenarios to assess what will happen if visitors are allocated in different ways throughout the app. For example, if you have 50 users, with 25 of them browsing through products and 25 at check-out. Alternatively, you might look at what would happen if 45 of those users tried to check out at the same time. Using a load testing tool can provide valuable insights using real scenarios .By the way, you can also check these test management tools that can help QA teams find free software solutions for quality assurance tasks like bug and issue tracking
User Experience Above All Else
It will ultimately be your user experience that impacts your ability to monetize. It doesn’t matter how many ads you sell through your app if there isn’t anyone there to view them. It doesn’t matter how many great shopping deals you have if a user gets frustrated and leaves before the checkout transaction is complete.
By load testing, you figure out where there are potential bottlenecks before you launch your app to the general public. You identify other problems that might arise, causing the user frustration that leads to abandonment. In taking these steps, you keep your costs down for both customer service and fixing problems post-launch. To be successful in monetizing your app, create a load testing process and always keep the user at the forefront of your mind.