There are some excellent stats gathered about performance testing at this resource site.
I especially like the one that states 5 second response time is the cutoff point for the business doing well. If the app takes longer than 5 sec to respond, the company employees start to get frustrated. It makes sense to me that productivity will go down. That not only leads to unhappy employees, it invariably leads to lost customers and lost profits.
There were many studies done in the 20th century about productivity in America. One of the most profound that I read explained how employers that genuinely cared about its employees typically had higher productivity than companies that were treating employees like expendable machines.
One study was conducted in a factory where they took a subset of employees and put them in a special manufacturing room where they could be observed. They tried turning up the heat, down the heat, up the lighting, down the lighting, raising the tables, lowering the tables, etc. The concept was to see what environmental factors were most influential in getting employees to make more widgets in less time.
No matter what the experimenters did with the physical work conditions, productivity continued to climb. The workers in the special manufacturing room were making the same widgets as the workers in the main factory. They used the same process to make the widgets. They had no visible advantages, yet they cranked out the parts so much faster and with higher quality.
The secret? Just giving the employees special attention. They were “set apart”. They were treated with more respect. They were visited by the company executives regularly. Management was always asking them questions…and sincerely were listening to the answers.
Getting employees engaged and showing them respect made a huge difference.
How does that relate to web performance testing?
If employees are waiting for more than 5 seconds for an application to respond to them, they are impacted psychologically. They lose focus. They get upset. They blame IT. IT blames the company for not investing enough in performance testing budgets. Employees conclude that the managers don’t respect them. They don’t feel special – they feel neglected. They get emotional about having poor work conditions where management doesn’t care.
That has long-term disastrous affects on business results. Costs go up because employees are less productive. Profitability goes down because costs go up. Everyone is unhappy.
Why don’t more executives understand that load testing is so important to the bottom line?
When I get tired of waiting for a slow app, I usually stop using it. Wonder if General Motors has a bunch of slow responding applications?