Three Stages in a Startup Journey

We hear of startups that gained immense growth and turned into well-established business ventures. How do you think people reach these heights? Did they just work hard? Well, no it's not.

They acknowledged the importance of these 3 business risks - SPEED, SCALABILITY and STABILITY which are associated with the 3 stages of any business and implemented solutions to test and fix their online presence.

STAGE 1 - SPEED

Say, you are a budding startup that is selling its product/services online. Needless to say, a quick response to the requests/clicks will lead to end-user satisfaction. Questions you need to ask yourself:

• Is the application fast enough to respond within the expected time?
• Is the application capable of presenting the most current information to its users without a lag?
• Is the server responding within the maximum expected response time before an error is thrown?

These can be easily addressed by a couple of load tests with proper load testing tools that can enhance your application's performance.

STAGE 2 - SCALABILITY

Now you as the business owner, want more profits, and hence you would want more users on your website/mobile app. To attain this, the system must respond to a larger volume of data, also have more capacity, and hence SCALABILITY becomes the need of the hour.

• The application works well with say 100 users hitting at a time. But does it provide consistent and acceptable response times with thousands of concurrent users?
• It works well with a small database of say less than 1000 records but does it scale well on a large set (say millions, or billions of records)?
• Can the application withstand unanticipated peak loads?
• Does it autoscale (upscale the infrastructure with increased load and vice versa) efficiently?

This can be very well achieved with a series of scalability tests including volume and spike tests.

STAGE 3 - STABILITY

Well, you have established your business by scaling your application. But from a long term perspective, is it stable enough to provide reliability, uptime, and recoverability? Some common stability issues addressed by means of performance, stress and endurance tests include:

• Can the application run for long periods of time without data corruption, slowdown, or servers needing to be rebooted?
• If the application does go down unexpectedly, what happens to partially completed transactions?
• When the application comes back online after scheduled or unscheduled downtime, will users still be able to see/do everything they expect?
• Can repeat functional errors cause a system crash?
• What if one of the nodes in the load-balanced environment fails? Does the application still provide uninterrupted service to users?
• Can the system be patched or updated without taking it down?

Performance Testing is highly essential for any online business throughout its journey from scratch to stability.

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