How to Meet Deadlines and Stay On Budget with a Performance Testing Team
A low-code development platform offers many advantages for meeting a timeline and staying on budget when developing software applications. One of the benefits to these platforms is that they handle a lot of features out of the box to jumpstart development projects. Many solutions, such as Appian, have robust authentication, user management, and security options built in. These features are meant to help reduce many of the widespread failures within IT projects. While using one of these platforms is a good start, their strengths alone cannot guarantee meeting proposed timelines and budgets. As recently as 2020, 1 in 6 IT projects have a cost overrun of 200%. The numbers are even worse at scale. IT projects with a budget of at least $1 million are 50% more likely to fail to meet business objectives. So how can you avoid these common cost overruns?
The cost of making changes increases over time. Defects discovered early on in a project are often less expensive to remedy. In that light, a qualified team of performance testers is one of the best ways to stay on budget and within a timeline.
Performance testers can help to ensure scalability.
First and foremost, performance testing teams focus on optimizing and scaling systems. One of the most detrimental roadblocks to an IT project is when an application is launched and immediately needs to be reworked. This setback often leads to a change in timeline and often means additional costs. A performance testing team ensures your application can handle the scale of your production user base and that certain processes are efficient. They do this by monitoring metrics that affect system speed–such as load times–against a testing environment that uses a production-like amount of users and data. Based on test results, the performance team recommends changes to the development team. This can be to the user interface, database, or other components to mitigate issues in system performance.
Performance testers monitor and report on process
Performance testers also monitor metrics relating to your processes. This includes information such as how many tickets or cases you are completing in a day and how long it takes for your users to complete a specific process. These types of observations can help influence system design decisions.
One of the most common mistakes to avoid is bringing in a performance testing team too late in the implementation process. If these key players are brought in right before a system is launched, performance testing will be much less beneficial. When performance testers are brought in too late, the development team will not have sufficient time to remediate the code according to the discoveries of the performance testing team. It is recommended that this team is brought in at the beginning of the project to work in tandem with the development team as solutions are built. By introducing performance testing early, issues can be nipped in the bud and fixed as development happens.
If the performance testing team is brought in late in the process, and timelines are adjusted to make the recommended changes, those delays will lead to additional costs. Even worse, a launch could proceed anyway, despite the performance testing team’s warnings. This could result in system downtime and frustrated users. This problem is compounded if you lose access to your original development resources when you launch, because a full development team might be required to fix the issues. Your previous developers might have already moved on to new projects as well, and they are the ones who are most familiar with your application.
Vision Point Systems has one of the premier performance testing teams in the industry. We specialize in making sure your system will realize all of the benefits it’s set out to accomplish. If you’d like to learn more about our performance testing team and how your organization can achieve optimal performance with our help, visit our website.
Author
