In today's lightning fast information era, where anyone with an Internet connection holds virtual press credentials, news travels fast. And bad news travels really fast. When it comes to introducing new mobile apps, if a first impression is less than stellar, you can bet that "#fail" tweets will soon follow.

For example, last year ESPN rolled out WatchESPN, a mobile app that allows fans to watch ESPN programming from mobile devices. Unfortunately, initially slow load times frustrated users and public criticism soon followed.

On Twitter, users wrote the following and more: "ESPN's new mobile app takes 15 seconds to load on my iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi. #fail"

To be sure, businesses and organizations are under intense pressure to roll out new applications on a continuous basis, to meet growing demands for ubiquitous access to information, and to make sure performance expectations are met. Mobile users - fair or not - expect the same performance and functionality from their apps when they're walking through Golden Gate Park surfing on their iPhone or sitting at their computer with a high-speed Internet connection. This is an unreasonable expectation, in part due to the inherent latency of the global mobile network and dynamic nature of mobile network conditions, but that's the way it is.

In the rush to deploy new mobile apps quickly to meet customer demand and keep pace with competitors, many companies fail to properly test their apps for performance. This leads to a cycle of monitoring applications for post-deployment failure, fixing them as quickly as possible, all while hoping for minimal PR backlash or wasted IT resources.

Industry analysts, including Forrester, EMA and others, agree that the average cost to a business of a production incident can exceed $45,000 per hour. This cost incorporates multiple factors that impact the business, including the cost of resources to resolve the incident along with the impact on business factors like revenue, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Without a doubt, $45,000 per hour can add up very fast. For example, if a production incident requires six days to fix, the impact on business is $2.1 million, and that's assuming only an 8-hour day. Even if a production incident requiring remediation can be fixed in one work day, the tab still adds up to $360,000.

There has to be a better way. Specifically, everyone from the CEO to the QA team must adopt a new mindset that values performance testing as an integral part of the mobile app development lifecycle and recognizes the importance of testing, validating and ensuring performance prior to deployment. Functional and security testing of applications is commonplace. However, functional testing, even under load, is not a substitute for performance testing; pressing button A and confirming action B is the result while working in a pristine test lab is not indicative of real-world performance. The real world - especially when it comes to mobile - is far from perfect. What takes four seconds to complete in a lab may take 30 seconds or more to complete under real world bandwidth, latency and packet loss conditions.

The only way to truly test how an application will perform in the real world is to test it under real world conditions. This includes testing for varying network speeds, impairments, and locations along with changes in usage levels that vary throughout the day.

In addition to avoiding bad press while keeping customers happy, companies that test for performance more thoroughly by emulating real world network conditions pre-deployment can save millions of dollars in development time.

The business and PR benefits of testing applications in real-world network conditions before launch are clear. Applications rushed to market will result in bad user experiences. And users will let the world know, quickly and loudly. Testing your applications for performance can take you from #fail to #win.