The journey of a software product isn’t complete after your application wins the love and devotion of the users. The need to cope with the target audience’s constantly changing preferences requires consistent implementation of new functionalities, which may lead to some unwanted consequences. In addition, the continuously growing complexity of software may result in decreased reliability and performance. Without a proper approach, your business risks losing customer loyalty and facing significant losses.
Considering these risks, it’s pretty apparent that taking preventive measures is irreplaceable. Software performance optimization can be executed as a set of activities helping you to ensure software reliability and keep its speed on an acceptable level. If you adopt application optimization as an integral part of the software development life cycle, you can protect yourself so that your investments are not wasted. In this article, we’ll share some tips on efficient application improvement.
First of all, it’s crucial to determine the primary goal of software performance optimization and its importance for your business. Without diving deep into technical depths, we can describe the process of application optimization as a set of modification activities whose main aim is to achieve the best possible or, let’s be realistic, at least acceptable performance and reliability. Constant monitoring is a must if you want to find the optimal way of achieving the required application performance level.
A number of factors may cause the need for software optimization, and they are not necessarily related to poorly done developer work. Indeed, in some cases, badly written code may lead to decreased performance and require rework. But besides this pretty apparent reason for making some changes, some examples are arising from the features of the natural life cycle of software.
For example, every business wants to expand its client base as much as possible. However, the influx of new users can significantly influence the application performance and lead to a bad user experience. Therefore, software optimization should always be kept in mind if you want to avoid problems while scaling up your application.
Performance optimization relies on many different metrics and focuses on many different sides of the application depending on specific situations. For example, the amount of memory the application uses during its work may become a severe issue. But despite all the complexity of the software optimization process, one of its primary purposes is to cut the time of performing the operations as much as possible. For example, if you make your customers wait too long while the application is processing the order details, you can discourage them from using your services. Likewise, if you invest in software to be used by your employees, most probably, in most cases, its poor performance will cause significant delays and decreased productivity.
When we talk about the application response time, usually, the competition is to keep it below 0.1 seconds. In this case, the user won’t see any delays, and you can expect the best possible experience. The average response time equal to 1.0 seconds is totally acceptable and, in most cases, won’t disappoint your clients. In this scenario, the users’ attention won’t be defocused, so most probably, while your app is loading, they won’t try to entertain themselves by watching TV or checking what your market competitors have to offer. Ten seconds and more is a total disaster. In this case, you better be sure that your application provides functionality that has no analogues. Software with such a big response time can barely keep the users’ attention, and in this case, you must start thinking about application modernization.
Any experienced company that provides custom software development services knows that software optimization should not be seen as a set of urgent measures to address emergency problems. Instead, it’s crucial to foresee every possible performance issue in advance and design the development process accordingly.
However, it’s barely possible to know beforehand which problems your users will face one day, so make sure you have enough resources for scrupulous analysis intended to detect the very root of their problem. Sometimes you may feel like your application’s poor performance reached its limit, so you don’t have any choice rather than building a new one from scratch. Suppose you cooperate with a reliable software developer with broad expertise. In that case, there’s a chance that specialists will reveal some under-the-hood problems that can be solved with a bit of optimization. Such an approach will help you to cut costs on measures aimed at user retention.
Source code, the heart and soul of the application, is what requires special attention. The dazzling variety of programming languages, libraries, and frameworks, each with its application area, can significantly harden the task of writing readable and maintainable code. First of all, exhaustive documentation is the number one priority. In the long run, documenting every possible aspect of the application will save you tons of time and effort. It’s a pretty common situation when software optimization is a task for not the same people who initially developed it. In such a case, documentation will be a guarantee against the need to repair sometimes quite complex functionality blindly.
Technical debt is an issue caused by the developers’ intention to save time. Usually, it means that trying to complete the project on time, the application developers choose the quicker solution instead of the optimal one. This alluring path is fraught with many problems that can accumulate and appear in the future. In some cases, technical debt is a necessary evil, and it’s the developer’s concern to balance efficiently between time-consuming reliable solutions and those that may become a massive headache for the application modernization team in the future.
It’s crucial to understand that application optimization is an integral part of the product life cycle and not a set of emergency measures that you can resort to when first users start to turn away from you. When considering the budget to support and maintain your application, think of application modernization activities as insurance that one day will save you from a disaster that can cost you dearly if you ignore it. Allocation of funds that will cover programmers’ working hours to fix performance issues caused by the intention to save time during the initial development process must not be underestimated.
Nothing’s perfect, but our intention to achieve perfection allows creating incredible things. Application optimization is an irreplaceable means of bringing the software product to the most optimal shape. Design flaws, inattention to the quality of code, the need for quick implementation of new functionality, and dozens of other reasons can lead to poor performance of your application. The good news is that if you understand that optimization is an ongoing process that must be included in your roadmap, chances are pretty high that you can avoid the lion’s share of potential problems.
