With a robust economy and challenging competition, every boost you can get can be a key differentiating factor to gaining market share. One of these boosts in the mobile economy is maintaining app performance and ensuring peak output. A broken or even slow app can send the wrong signals to your end-users and be detrimental to acquiring new customers.
When it comes to long-term growth, your app’s processes are essential. Fortunately, there is a way your mobile app always runs as intended, and that’s where having an optimized mobile app strategy can essentially pay for itself. Having an experienced application development team can help eliminate the headaches of a slow-running or broken app. Here we discuss the key benefits of an application performance management team and how it can help your company’s bottom line:
What is Application Performance Management?
In the technical fields of system management and information technology, application performance management is the monitoring and regulation of software application performance and availability. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. Both functions are essential for providing the best possible output and highest customer satisfaction for your mobile apps.
Key Performance Metrics for Information Technology
Your application performance management team can use many metrics to determine the performance level of your app. These include:
- User Satisfaction: Also known as the Apdex score, user satisfaction is the industry standard for understanding your application’s performance. The way it works is it estimates how long a transaction should take. The transactions are then segmented into fast, sluggish, slow, and failed categories. Then, the transaction converts into a satisfaction score for every process in your application. The score is between 0 and 100.
- Response Time: To measure response time, you formulate a test that sends a request to your application. Once sent, the response time measures the time it takes to return the response from the application. It is an essential performance testing metric because it indicates how long the user has to wait to process a request through the app.
- Error Rate: Detecting errors is essential for application performance. The last thing you want your end-users to experience when using your application is an error. The error rate is the number of errors in proportion to all requests conducted during a testing cycle. There are different ways to determine the error rate: the number of requests that end in an error, the number of logged errors from your application, and the number of exceptions in the test cycle.
- Count of Application Instances: When scaling your application, it is important to know how many application instances you have running. Having auto-scaling functions ensures your app scales based on changes in demands and can save your company money by adjusting during off-peak times.
- Request Rate: The request rate is the amount of request given to an application in a specific time frame. You must know how traffic will impact the functionality of your app. All other key performance metrics feel the impact in changes of user traffic. When you monitor the request rate, you can indicate cyclical spikes or inactiveness in user activity. Inactiveness is always a bad signal that you should be closely monitoring.
Tools Used to Diagnose Application Issues
There are many proven methods and tools your performance management team can use to get to the heart of your issues. They can use these insights to interject in a project experiencing a lack of activity or develop a maintain/ update strategy for internal or external applications. Here are some of the tools your team could use to diagnose these issues:
- Load Testing: Load testing determines how the application system reacts when multiple users are using it at the same time. Testers usually use the peak time for the test. Load testing is important because it measures the system’s behavior under extreme inputs and can help determine the operating capacity.
- Root Cause Analysis: Testers use root cause analysis (RCA) to determine any defects in the application. Once they identify the defect and understand the root of the cause, they can then formulate actionable solutions. When done correctly, developers can help prevent defects in later phases, releases, or similar applications.
- Monitoring Synthetic and Real-User: Synthetic and real monitoring are two different tools that measure the same thing. For instance, real monitoring uses actual user measurements and metrics to track performance. On the other hand, synthetic monitoring uses data that simulates real users to track performance and other key metric indicators.
- Stress Testing: Also known as fatigue testing, stress testing measures your application’s performance outside its normal working parameters. Testers intentionally give the software more inputs than it is estimated to handle. The primary goal of a stress test is to measure an application’s stability after its maximum load. The goal is to determine the point of failure and how your system can recover.
What You Can Do To Improve Your Application’s Performance
The overbearing message here is that businesses with smaller software management teams can work with a dynamic support group that knows how to step into sluggish or even abandoned projects. They can help your team finish an unfinished project as well as provide performance testing on products already released. Not to mention, they can add updates to meet current market demands.
Want to start a conversation? We have a rapid local presence in the US and are ready to help any business with application development and maintenance. Our dedicated team of performance testers is here to help. If you would like to learn more about our services and expertise, feel free to contact us today.
