CustomerCentrix

David Johnson wrote a good article back in December entitled Building a Performance Assurance Center of Excellence tutorial. In it, David makes a solid high-level case for why performance testing is important.

Here is the excerpt:

Unfortunately, users usually remember the worst experience with a company better than the best experience. So, performance testing is a crucial component of any deployment because application performance has a direct impact on the end-user experience, which directly impacts your revenue stream. Performance testing can make the difference between a satisfied customer and a customer who switches to a competing provider.

Performance problems often have a significant affect on the user experience because of the extended time and effort required to remediate performance issues. Performance issues don't always get resolved overnight, and performance fixes often require a total interruption in service.

Performance testing mitigates your performance risk by measuring the ability of your application and your architecture to meet the customer's performance expectations before it is exposed to the user community. It's a must, not a nice to have.