Customers are used to speed and ease online. When an app doesn't load in seconds, this customer loyalty can be lost in seconds too. To deliver a frictionless CX every time and retain hard-won customers, performance testing throughout the development cycle is key.

We brought senior leaders together to explore a new approach to performance testing, one in which the high-quality delivery of an application is everyone’s responsibility – from the designer, coder, developer, QA tester to the performance engineer. This allows teams to collectively design agile, durable software that’s fit for purpose from the start.

Our evening began with an introduction from Nimbus Ninety’s Founder and Managing Director, Emma Taylor. Emma introduced the evening’s purpose: to explore ways to enhance performance testing for world-class results. We kicked off with a presentation from Mike Smith, Neoload Territory Lead at Neotys to talk to our members about this topic. 

Interesting, Mike started by explaining why, surprising, a slow application is worse than an application that is down. Mike discussed how savvy enterprises are developing engaging messaging to stay on-side with customers and direct them to alternative platforms when an application is down. Whereas, when an application is up and running but slow, Mike explained that this can directly impact business outcomes, from competitiveness to revenue and customer retention. We heard that when a leading online retailer slowed down their site by just 100 milliseconds, they saw a 1% loss in sales. 

It’s key for enterprises to understand the full implications of a poorly performing application and this extends beyond B2C and B2B applications too. During the initial rush to work from home, a lack of testing for internal applications slowed down many businesses and caused lower levels of employee satisfaction.  

Following insights from Mike, we turned to a group discussion with members to delve into their current approaches to performance testing in more detail. We learnt how enterprises often grapple with being able to test applications quickly and efficiently enough. Within an ever-evolving and complex IT stack, it can be harder than ever to find the bottleneck. 

Our members then shared their experiences of using both manual testing and automated testing and their journey to cloud solutions. While these moves were benefiting our members, we heard how members were still encountering challenges when it came to implementing high quality performance testing at scale. 

We then explored members' journeys to move from waterfall to agile working. The benefit of this approach is that it allows more testing to take place by the whole team before it reaches the Quality Assurance or Centre of Excellence team.

We heard that it is essential to “shift left” and this means enabling testing to take place earlier in the DevOps cycle. Giving coders the ability to perform a performance test with just a line of code really works. 

Insightful thoughts and experiences were shared by all attendees and our members left with new ideas and solutions to enhance and improve their performance testing by building this into the process as early as possible. 

This event was in partnership with Tricentis, an automated software testing provider.