With pressure on organizations to develop, integrate and deploy web applications at a rapid pace, web application issues are an all-too-common problem that could be avoided if better testing was done prior to going live, according to research results released by the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), the world's largest knowledgebase for Oracle Applications users.
The OAUG ResearchLine study, "Performance Under Presssure: The State of Enterprise Web Application Quality and Availability," was conducted by Unisphere Research in partnership with Oracle Corp., and focused on the value of monitoring, testing and quality assurance of web applications.
The survey of 526 application managers from a range of companies examined web-based enterprise application issues from both an online customer perspective and an IT perspective.
According to the study results, as e-commerce site consumers, nearly all respondents have experienced online problems. When that has happened, a majority simply abandoned their transactions, one out of four switched to competitive sites and one out of six indicated they would never do business with that vendor again both online and offline.
The study also found that at least one-third of respondents did not know the specifics of many critical aspects of application performance within their own enterprises, such as response times, failure rates and testing.
And according to the research, many organizations do not know of problems unless customers bring those issues to their attention. Eighty percent of respondents at large e-commerce companies-those with more than $50 million in annual revenues from e-commerce websites-indicated they are alerted to web application issues by calls from customers/end-users. A lack of resources, time, funding and proper tools were reasons cited for web applications lacking user-experience monitoring capabilities.
More than two-thirds of respondents felt that the problems encountered with their web-based applications could have been virtually eliminated during the application's development or test phase; however a significant 65% of respondents said that a majority of their web-based applications were not deployed with adequate load testing.
"Enterprise web applications that fail to perform consistently and satisfactorily are a source of lost productivity and frustration for internal users and prompt many potential customers to abandon transactions," states Raymond Payne, president of the OAUG. "The implications are significant, especially when the practices for monitoring, testing and quality assurance can help to reduce web application performance problems."
The executive summary of the survey results is available to all OAUG members and interested media. Members can access the survey results through the OAUG's website.