Introduction
Think of yourself as an international online retail website. How would you manage your testing? This article shares some important tips on the performance considerations and performance testing tips for online retail.
Performance Considerations
Before we deal into how to test, we need to look at some important considerations surrounding the cloud-based online retail application. To name a few:
- Yearly peak demand times
- Distribution of demand amongst the various functional groups (browse, compare, checkout, ….)
- Forecasting future demands
- Regional/International considerations (Black Friday, Diwali, Boxing Day, Christmas, ….)
- Regular peaks (minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day)
- Important events like popular product launches
- Removal of outliers
Performance testing tips for online retail
One of the key requirements for such a large requirement is the ability to simulate such traffic. By studying continuously over many years, you could successfully come up with a simulation environment which adequately replicates the real-time. This is the base. Once this is established, the resource allocation for demands can be fine-tuned as we go by. Continuous learning and integrating the experience into the data model is the next step.
As you can figure, several factors identified in the list above can have individual test strategies. Some include:
- Testing of Machine Learning for forecasting
- Minute, hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly peak demands testing
- Regional and international days, distribution of load and its testing
- Product launch testing
- Making sure that outliers are not considered in the data model
Conclusion
That’s a summary of what is needed in performance testing tips for online retail, but the task is quite exhaustive! It needs elaborate simulation, monitoring, and adjustments. But I hope that this article would have provided you a glimpse of what is involved. For detailed performance testing strategy for your product, feel free to setup an initial complimentary consultation call to assess and take things forward. Look forward to hear from you!