The Need of Performance Engineering in the Digital Age

Do you know that Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, can amaze you with some popular dialogues from The Lego Batman Movie? According to a recent online feature, Apple’s digital assistant can give away some catchy dialogues from the animation flick, only if you act and assume that she is the Batcomputer. From Siri to Alexa, the Digital arena is pounding with change and innovation, increasingly driving human-machine communication. This sets ground for impactful Digital Performance Engineering with comprehensive Software Performance Engineering solutions.

What is Digital Performance Engineering?

Digital Performance Engineering entails anything and everything that ensures seamless and desired performance from the overall system or an application in the digital landscape.

The digital sphere has innumerable aspects that may keep challenging the application’s smooth functioning and expected performance parameters. Digital Performance Engineering puts together mechanisms, processes, practices and tools, and applies engineering rules within the software development cycle to confirm that the application sustains the challenges posed by the digital landscape and fulfils the non-functional requirements.

For instance, when you access a financial application for some transactions, it involves numerous tasks – traction with the merchant site for checking the products, social sharing for feedback on the product, checking the ratings for the product, and finally connecting with the bank for final payment.

This calls for seamless functionality of the application, irrespective of the data bandwidth or any other disruptions on the go. Performance Engineering and Performance Testing help detect these disruptions by tasking the application with various external forces.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital Transformation entails revamping and modernizing enterprise-level activities by leveraging digital technologies to reach out effectively and serve the user base. It also involves gauging the impact of digital technology across the enterprise’s workflow and establish ways to get services delivered with the desired impact.

Why is it so critical for the new age organizations to embrace Digital Transformation?

It is becoming increasingly indispensable for organizations to consider the benefits that Digital Transformation is set to bring for you. The business landscape is changing and enterprises have no option but to change with time. Digital Transformation can speed up business activities, workflows, and strategically make an enterprise competent in a highly volatile landscape.

Digital Transformation is expected to bring business transformation by boosting technology innovation, customer behavior, and managing external factors. This further accelerates speed-to-market in a set-up where time defines your profitability. Everything boils down to how well the technology helps you reach your end customers.

In clear and definite words, Digital Transformation is all about meeting customer expectations. It forms the core of any Digital Transformation story. For instance, Siri could be just a Digital Assistant, but it is critical for the application or the Artificial Intelligence tool to offer accurate response whenever spoken to.

The moment there is disruption in the response from Siri, it can lead to major disappointment for an Apple user. You know it all. Today, even brands like Apple cannot afford such disruptions in expectations. There has to be a potent combination and use of Big Data and Data Analytics to present the right data to the user.

We are increasingly depending on technology-enabled assistance such as Bots, Digital Assistants, Smart Machines and a whole gamut of Artificially Intelligent tools to deal with day-to-day enterprise level challenges.

What we all expect and work towards is accuracy and convenience, over and above the conventional means. That’s when Digital Technologies and Digital Transformation bring relevance and add value for an enterprise.

Can Performance Engineering power such accuracy and resilience?

Performance Engineering and Testing with its intrinsic benefits can help you deliver the desired applications and systems in a digital set-up. Technically, Performance Engineering is a discipline that comprises practices, processes, and methodologies, which, when applied in the software development cycle, help an application or system to deliver non-functional requirements.

What are the non-functional requirements?

Every system/application is designed and developed to deliver a particular operation/outcome. Performance Engineering helps test and confirm the overall process rather than just confirm a particular behaviour or singular aspect.

Performance Engineering reinforces a set of principles that empower teams to deliver faster, efficiently, and develop responsive systems that are designed and developed to bear the expectations and load of diverse audience. Performance Engineering principles can help digital enterprises to effectively deliver applications for the customers and employees.

Today application building and testing implies getting prepared for the worse or rather for the failures. While ensuring Performance, enterprises are actually testing for all probabilities of failures. Engineers test every aspect of the application/technology at hand to stretch it to the edge of its performance capacities.

So, rightly as experts suggest, Performance engineering means checking failures that might occur at speed, with load, or with unreasonable use of the application. In a way, it implies testing to build resilience.

Resilience is the capacity of an application to rebound from the failures and still perform as expected. It is a critical aspect to consider in the Digital landscape, as there are numerous factors that can impact the performance of the application – number of users, internet bandwidth, and issues with third party merchants, data breaches, and much more that can be left to our wild imagination.

Performance Engineering helps build the robustness of the application/system and consequently meet user expectations in the digital age. Resilience will determine business viability and profitability. It is a sequential process, as there are no defined patterns to build robust applications for the digital age. It builds over time and experimentation.

The most prominent reason for investing in a comprehensive Performance Engineering plan is to build resilience. The art is to squeeze every aspect of the technology platform or application to give the desired outcome and at the same time determine the probable vulnerabilities.

Performance means various things – Speed, Velocity, Quality, Responsiveness, Integrity, Security, Stability, Consistency, and it could be much more. A digitally engaged and enabled customer can expect anything or rather everything from the application. Performance Engineers have been working towards building the right and required interface for the digital era.

Cigniti’s Performance Testing Center of Excellence (PCoE) provides end-to-end performance testing solutions to help our clients launch future proof applications with high responsiveness, availability, and scalability. Our Performance Testing services comprise performance engineering that includes capacity planning, baseline test, load, stress, endurance and benchmarking against competitors, production monitoring, and consulting.

Contact our Performance Engineers to build applications that bring velocity and quality for your digitally enabled customers.