In the Era of Social Distancing, Performance and Scalability Testing are Critical

The coronavirus pandemic has changed all facets of our lives, ranging from how we work to how we relax to how our children learn. There are countless implications of this, including the potential for long-term and, in some cases, permanent changes to business processes. Just 12% of the respondents in a recent Gartner survey believe their businesses are highly prepared for the impact of coronavirus and the majority expect the pandemic to disrupt operations for the foreseeable future.

In this blog series, we’ll examine some of the enterprise implications of coronavirus and what steps companies can take to mitigate them. This post will look specifically at the role of performance and scalability testing. As the world adjusts to the new normal brought about by coronavirus, consumers are increasingly shopping online and more reliant on streaming services and other digital products.

In this environment, it’s absolutely essential that websites and applications are prepared for surges in traffic and perform as expected. Grocery delivery apps have already made headlines for their struggles and, while unprecedented demand and supply chain issues are certainly drivers, it nevertheless underscores why technology performance is so critical. Given the unique challenges facing the grocery sector, there is no way the industry could have entirely prepared for the coronavirus surge.

However, other eCommerce retailers and digital services should focus on performance and scalability testing now to ensure customers can rely on their infrastructure throughout the pandemic’s duration. And the only way to truly evaluate performance is by adopting a user-centric approach to testing. Eggplant’s intelligent, AI-driven testing platform gives companies the unique ability to simulate virtual users at both the application UI and network protocol levels. As a result, organizations can obtain a true understanding of the customer experience at scale and identify and resolve issues quickly, before they have the chance to actually impact performance.

In addition to obtaining this holistic understanding of performance, Eggplant also provides companies with the following benefits:

• The ability to present performance issues in an intuitive, accessible manner to non-technical lines of business
• The opportunity to deploy human testers more strategically, by automating regression and exploratory testing
• Reduced acquisition and infrastructure costs even as customer experience and conversion rates improve 

These benefits are always important, but they are particularly critical now as companies navigate the coronavirus response. With testing teams working remotely and many employees juggling homeschooling and childcare, our approach ensures these distributed organizations can address their performance and scalability needs even in these challenging circumstances.

We’ll be exploring some of these themes in future posts in this series, so keep an eye on the blog for more. And if you’d like to learn more about how Eggplant can help you address coronavirus-related performance and scalability requirements, please click here.