User reported that SPA is slow, crashes and hangs. How to handle?

Question

I am the only one manual tester in a team that develops a heavy single page application. Recently we have received a complain from our user, that the application is very slow, hangs and crashes every time when he's using it.

This is the first time I am dealing with this kind of situation. So far I've gathered the following clues.

• The information about user's environment has been collected (OS, browser version - latest chrome, win7)
• User has a slow internet. He claimed his speed is ~2MBPS.
• The problem seems to occur when the tab with an application has been idle for a long time.
• The problem also seems to be related to heavy content that he created.

However I have failed to reproduce the issue in the similar to what he has environment.

What could be the next steps for me to take as a tester?

Answer 1

Establish minimal requirements to use the application. Recent version of browser, minimal internet speed, etc. State that for obsolete browsers, old versions of OS and slow connection speed, performance of the app might not be reliable, and you are not testing for such configuration and cannot guarantee the functionality.

Write polite email to the customer that his bug report was entered in bug database and will be prioritized to work accordingly, with more priority given to more common requests. This should give them a hint. Ask if using faster connection is an option (at least temporarily) while trying to troubleshoot. Tell him that increasing the connection speed solved problems for other (if that is true).

First priority is to focus on areas which will benefit most of your customer base.

If one small customer who refuses to upgrade his/her internet connection customer is taking lots of your development resources, you are doing it wrong. If one customer wants custom solution, to handle singular particular requirements benefiting no-one else, that customer should pay for such development. It would be unfair to expect other customers to subsidize efforts not benefiting them, jut that one customer.

You don't need to hang to all your customers - only to the profitable ones. If supporting requests to a customer costs more than that customer pays for services, sound business decision is either increase price of services or abandon the customer.

Answer 2

The procedure we follow in such situations that we simulate the environment of the user, if we could not reproduce it, then in our report we mention that we could not reproduce it due to these reasons ("lack of info", "lack of hardware", "need more loaded DB", etc...).

if you have all the conditions the user has then in the report say that you simulated the user's environment and nothing happened, so the user might has done something wrong ("wrong settings","deleted files", etc...).

Usually the applications record log files that often give a clue of what the problem is, so if your application generates log files then ask the user to provide you with them.

My advice is that the user might not know how to describe the conditions well, so keep trying ("more loaded DB", press more, test more scenarios, try more clients connecting to same server, etc..), and mention all things you did in the report. Tester mind should be like, "How can I break this?".