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Tag: website performance

  • Catchpoint Enables Experimentation by Automating Web App Testing

    Catchpoint Enables Experimentation by Automating Web App Testing

    Catchpoint this week expanded its open source WebPageTest performance testing suite of tools to enable IT teams to run instant tests that surface suggestions for improving overall web application and site performance.

    In addition, Catchpoint is now providing support for private tests, bulk tests and priority testing capabilities within the WebPageTest tool suite.

    Tim Kadlec, director of engineering for WebPageTest, said the goal is to make it easier for both developers and DevOps teams to experiment with how changes to applications and websites could improve performance using a capability that has now been added to the core suite.

    Identifying opportunities to improve performance typically requires tediously constructing manual tests over a period of weeks, noted Kadlec. Much of that effort is experimental in the sense that no one knows for sure if the tests being constructed will have a material impact on performance.

    The Opportunities and Experiments capability provides teams with a low-code tool for building tests based on a set of best practices that Catchpoint has defined. That approach makes it simpler to automatically generate and test tweaks that, for example, eliminate blocking scripts, optimize image rendering and minimize layout shifts. The result is optimization tests that show how their applications and websites could benefit from specific, actionable improvements without having to change any of the code that has already been deployed, said Kadlec.

    That’s a critical capability because it will encourage a level of experimentation that previously IT teams shied away from, simply because the amount of effort required to achieve an uncertain outcome was too high.

    It’s not precisely clear who is conducting these types of tests, as more responsibility for testing applications continues to shift left toward developers. The latest additions to WebPageTest make it easier for developers to conduct those tests without necessarily requiring help from a DevOps team, noted Kadlec.

    While there has always been a tremendous amount of focus on web application and site performance, the attention level has risen across organizations in the digital business transformation era. Many of the processes being implemented via web applications are extremely latency-sensitive. As more of those applications become routinely tested, the overall level of application performance should steadily improve.

    At the same time, the number of web applications and websites that most organizations are supporting also continues to expand. Most of those organizations are looking for ways to test applications without necessarily having to expand the size of the testing team or significantly increase the amount of time spent on testing.

    Regardless of the approach, it is apparent that testing is becoming more automated. The goal is not so much to eliminate the need for dedicated testing teams, but reduce the number of rote tasks that contribute to test avoidance in the interest of saving time. In theory, the more tests run—and the earlier they are run—the fewer issues that DevOps teams will need to deal with later.

  • How to Automate Testing for Optimal Customer Experience

    How to Automate Testing for Optimal Customer Experience

    During a sudden surge in online traffic like the one many companies have seen over the past few months, automated testing can help organizations optimize the customer experience

    Imagine you manage an e-commerce office supply company and are dealing with a sudden surge in traffic—with more people working from home, demand for your products has grown significantly. But when a customer attempts to complete a purchase, they encounter a debilitating error such as a broken button or a page that won’t load. Now imagine this happening to hundreds of customers simultaneously, during the most critical time of day for purchases on your site. Imagine the revenue lost, the customers never to return, the complaints on social media—it’s a situation everyone wants to avoid.

    But this is a situation many will have to handle at some point. Web pages are large, complex beasts made up of different images, fonts, style sheets, local JavaScript code, asynchronous requests to the backend and more. It’s easy to forget how many scripts hold a website together. And any small change can have a butterfly effect on the overall page performance.

    What does the user actually see and experience on the website? And what happens if changes are made in the backend? Does the “Buy” button suddenly disappear? Is everything still working as it should? To understand how an application behaves with users, companies need to understand those users’ experiences when they interact with the application over a browser. All too often this means manually checking the availability and functionality of individual online applications, and then hoping that users do not stumble upon additional problems that may have fallen through the cracks.

    Accounting for and identifying these potential problems and regressions is not only an uncomfortable process, but also a lengthy one. Especially in times of increasing traffic and new digital business, as we’ve experienced in these times of WFH and e-commerce, the continuous review of all digital experiences is essential. A customer’s first impression is crucial, and even a long-term customer may go elsewhere if a page doesn’t load or if a button doesn’t work. Options abound on the internet—you can’t risk someone giving up on your business and trying a competitor’s.

    Why Automating Browser Tests Is Important

    In browser-based applications and websites, browser tests can monitor the user experience and ensure that user actions, such as registering for a new account or adding items to a shopping cart, work smoothly—even after changes in the backend.

    Popular browser test solutions have long since reduced the manual effort required to confirm that new features didn’t break already existing functions, but the implementation and maintenance of these tests is very time-consuming. In addition to learning a new test framework for these solutions, teams need to set up a test infrastructure and update faulty tests with every change to the user interface, costing valuable time that could be used for new product development.

    The latest generation of fully automated browser tests, on the other hand, allows everyone on the team to record and automate rich browser-based test scenarios in minutes—without any code. The “Tester” opens the corresponding website or application via the test tool and starts the recording. As she interacts with the website or application, the solution automatically records all actions as a series of steps, which can then be edited or changed when reviewing the recording. Assertions can also be added, such as whether a user sees a welcome message when they log in.

    If a test is recorded, it is possible to define how often and on which devices it is to be carried out and from which places around the globe the tests are to be played to mimic users’ behavior. The recordings can be played over a variety of websites, including internal, non-publicly accessible applications or pre-production and CI environments. For each test run performed, the end-to-end duration of the test and a visualization of the duration of each step are provided. A screenshot is automatically created for each step and each query so testers can follow exactly what the user sees in each respective step. All the frontend errors and resources happening along the test are also collected for a simplified troubleshooting of failing test runs.

    Because websites are constantly modified by developers, once a test is created, machine learning algorithms detect changes to the application and automatically update the tests accordingly. If a browser test fails due to frontend or backend problems, an automated tool provides the context for quick troubleshooting. In addition to screenshots, frontend errors and frontend resources, the behavior of the backend services and infrastructure for this specific step is also provided.

    Using Time More Effectively

    Automated browser tests have traditionally been notoriously fragile, often breaking with minor changes to the user interface. To eliminate false positives, today’s ML-supported browser tests mimic human decision-making processes and adapt intelligently to changes in the application.

    For example, if a button is moved in a web application or the identifier of an element changes, the browser test derives from this how the existing test should be carried out in the updated user interface. If all steps and assertions in the test are successfully completed, the saved identification mechanism and test definition will be updated to reflect the changes on the page.

    If you’re always in a reactive mode, putting out fires that could have been avoided, the impact to revenue and customer satisfaction is only one half of the story. The revenue not generated, and customers not acquired, from improvements and new features, is the real problem for a business’ long-term health. Ultimately, browser tests give teams more freedom to focus on developing new features rather than manually reviewing functionality or redefining test frameworks over and over again. And in a distributed, work-from-home, always-online world, new product development is what wins the day.

  • 3 Approaches to End-User Experience Monitoring

    3 Approaches to End-User Experience Monitoring

    The volume of transactions running through websites and mobile apps make customer-facing applications crucial to online businesses. If these applications perform well for their users, they generate revenue for the business. If they don’t, they affect the credibility of the business, which in turn affects the overall revenue. It is therefore imperative that businesses using monitoring to understand how well their revenue-critical applications are behaving for their end users.

    From an IT team’s point of view, understanding the user experience of their applications is becoming more challenging as technology evolves. Newer and more complex applications are being written using an assortment of languages. These applications are being deployed on a wide variety of infrastructure components. To add to that, today’s users access these modern applications on a variety of devices such as the web, smartphones, tablets and smart watches.

    Fortunately, there are a few means available through which businesses can determine the user experience of their web applications. Let’s take a look at three common approaches below.

    Real User Monitoring (RUM)

    Real user monitoring is a passive monitoring approach that involves collecting metrics at the browser level to accurately determine the application performance as perceived by the end users. Monitoring at the browser level is achieved by injecting JavaScript snippets into the header and footer of the HTML code of the web application. This code will ascertain the full page-load experience—including downloading the assets from the content delivery network (CDN), rendering the page and executing the JavaScript from the browser’s perspective. Additional instrumentation can be used to collect more metrics by injecting additional JavaScript code.

    The data gathered through RUM provides answers to questions about user experience such as:

    • How long did it take to load the full page?
    • What is the response time from a network perspective (redirection time, DNS resolution time, connection time)?
    • What is the time interval between sending the request and receiving the first byte of response?
    • What is the time taken by the browser to receive the response and render the page?
    • Are there any problems on the page? If yes, what caused the problem?
    • How is the performance when the application is accessed from different countries?
    • What is the response time across different browsers? Do new application updates affect the performance in a specific version of the browser?
    • How does the application perform on different platforms such as desktop, web and mobile?

    The biggest advantage of monitoring real user data is that it relies on actual traffic to take measurements. There is no need to script the important use cases, which can save a lot of time and resources.

    Real user monitoring captures everything as a user goes through the application, so performance data will be available irrespective of what pages the user sees. This is particularly useful for complex apps in which the functionality or content is dynamic.

    Server-Side Monitoring

    Although user experience is best tracked at the browser level, application performance monitoring at the server side also provides insight into end-user performance. Server-side monitoring is mostly used in conjunction with real user monitoring. This is because problems originating on the server side can only be efficiently detected using server-side monitoring.

    Monitoring performance on the server side involves agent-based instrumentation technology for acquiring and transmitting data. This monitoring approach is used to watch user transactions in real time and troubleshoot issues such as slowness or application bugs.

    Developers have to install agents on the application server to help capture and visualize transactions end to end, with performance statistics across all components, from the URL down to the SQL level. This visual breakdown reveals the flow of all the user transactions being executed in each layer of the application infrastructure.

    Server-side monitoring helps track response time and throughput taken by each application component, with the option to trace transactions end to end via code analysis. This helps the IT operations/DevOps teams identify slow web transactions and then isolate performance issues down to the level of the specific application code that caused them. The underlying database is also monitored most of the time to determine slow database calls, database usage and overall database performance. With server-side monitoring, users will be able to identify the SQL queries executed during a transaction and thus identify the worst-performing queries.

    Synthetic Transaction Monitoring

    Synthetic transaction monitoring is an active monitoring technique based on the concept of simulating the actions of an end user on a web application. This method involves the use of external agents executing prerecorded scripts that mimic end-user behavior at regular time intervals. The monitoring agents are usually very light and do not create any additional load on network traffic.

    Most application performance monitoring solutions provide recorder tools to capture the actions or paths a typical end user might take in an application, such as log in, view product, search and check out. These recordings are saved as scripts, which are then executed by the agents from different geographical locations.

    Technically, there are two different approaches to generating requests. Some solutions replay recorded HTTP traffic patterns, while others drive real browser instances. The second approach is more useful for modern applications that make a lot of JavaScript, CSS and Ajax calls.

    Since synthetic transaction monitoring involves sending requests across the network, it can measure the response time of application servers and network infrastructure. This type of monitoring does not require actual web traffic, so you can use this approach to test your web applications prior to launch—or anytime you like. Many companies use synthetic monitoring before entering production in the form of automated integration tests with Selenium.

    Synthetic monitoring does have its limitations, though. Since it is based on predefined transactions, it does not monitor the perception of real end users. Transactions have to be “read-only” because they would otherwise set off real purchase processes. This limits the usage to a certain subset of your business-critical transactions.

    The best approach is to use synthetic transaction monitoring as a reference measurement that will help identify performance degradation, detect network problems and notify in case of errors.

    Every business is different and has its own requirements that can help to choose which type of monitoring to implement. An ideal strategy would be to use active and passive monitoring techniques side by side so that no stone is left unturned in the pursuit to monitor end-user experience.

    About the Author / Sridhar Iyengar

    Sridhar Iyengar is vice president, product management, at ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corp. For more information on ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, please visit www.manageengine.com; follow the company blog at http://blogs.manageengine.com, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ManageEngine and on Twitter @ManageEngine. Follow Sridhar on Twitter @iSridhar.

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