There are various categories of testing with different objectives and purpose. However, the ultimate goal of testing is to ensure high quality product and customer satisfaction. The level of customer satisfaction might vary from customer to customer. There are various tools and techniques to monitor such variance. Performance monitoring is a technique that can be used to monitor your web application based on their response time. You can use any of the performance monitoring tools to analyze the level of customer happiness.
How happy is your customer after using your app?
An application consists of different pieces, with each providing different ideas about happiness depending upon their response level. A faster response time is more likely to make customers happy. So, a customer can be considered overall satisfied if all the reconciled pieces of the application can create the required satisfaction level. But, how this can be achieved?
Fortunately, there is a standard measurement system or methodology to solve this.
Apdex is an adept tool that analyzes the performance of an application to measure the level of customer satisfaction. It uses a uniform scale of 0 to 1 to measure the performance, where 0 represents no satisfied users and 1 suggests that all users are satisfied. This metric can be used to convert a number of measurements in its form. For example, you can make use of the timing data gathered using a stopwatch for this metric. The tool neutralizes the difference by specifying a uniform method to measure the user experience.
It uses an index that converts the response time into a single number. The response time is recorded at the level at which a user interacts with the system. The response time of a task is basically the time taken by the system to respond to any user activity like mouse click, return, etc. However, the time might vary from task to task. The waiting periods for all such tasks are collectively considered the responsiveness of an application.
Following are the zones of responsiveness on which the index is based.
- Satisfied: This defines a certain time limit below which the users are not disrupted by the response time.
- Acceptable: The response time is more than expected due to performance issues. However, the user decides to continue the process.
- Frustrated: The performance is too bad with high response time. The user chooses to abandon the process.
The values of the Apdex scale can fall anywhere between 0 and 1. 1 represents the fully satisfied zone and 0 represents the unsatisfied zone. However, it is not necessary that every sample will achieve a perfect value of 1. The following rating scale has been developed to analyze an application’s performance.
- Excellent: 0.94 – 1.00
- Good: 0.85 – 0.94
- Fair: 0.70 – 0.85
- Poor: 0.50 – 0.70
- Unacceptable: 0.00 – 0.50
So, the performance of an application is able to decide the satisfaction level of the customers. You can use the collected information to compare along the same scale performance. With Apdex you can group various items and see everything related to a particular application.
