Load Testing: An Important Part of Continuous Testing

Load testing is an important part of any continuous testing strategy. What is load testing?  Load testing helps monitor the system’s response time to anticipated activity under user load. It helps point out problems in the application and point out bottlenecks before they become problematic and cost your company lost revenue. load testing is about finding scaling issues earlier, so you can minimize the impact to the business so you can control when you're fixing them.  When load testing is integrated into the continuous testing process, it ensures your code changes don’t negatively affect your performance or cause unexpected issues caused by real user load.

Here are 7 reasons why every company should be load testing when code changes or changes to infrastructure are made.

1. Understand real user scenarios. Unit, integration and UI tests are great and should be part of your development process. However, a good user experience requires more than just meeting the requirements --- the system has to be fast enough to keep your customers satisfied. Your application might perform very differently when real user activity is simulated. You don’t want to wait until production to find out.
2. Ensure cloud infrastructure is configured to scale. Most companies are moving or have moved at least some part of their infrastructure to the cloud. Many of these companies assume that their infrastructure doesn’t need to be tested with the application because “infrastructure in the cloud is scalable”. Even infrastructure in the cloud needs to be configured correctly to ensure there isn’t performance degradation under load.
3. Find bottlenecks and other issues under load. It is common for load testing to expose bottlenecks and bugs in your system that are very hard to find otherwise. Issues with response time, error rate, CPU and memory leakage can be found as load increases. Once the inefficiencies are identified, fixes can be put in place before the issues cause bad experiences costing the company users and revenue.
4. Test upcoming launches, promotions and holiday traffic. When you have a big launch approaching or expected increase of traffic due to a promotion or holiday like Cyber Monday, the last thing you want is to put a bunch of money and time into your launch for it to fall flat when your system can’t handle the traffic. Companies lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because of this. Load testing can help prevent this system failure by finding it early and allowing time to fix bugs and configure infrastructure. Read a case study about How Testery helped QuadPay Sail Through a 300x Increase in Traffic During Cyber Week
5. Faster releases. Teams will see reduced time between build and deploys when load testing is integrated into the an agile development and continuous integration processes. It much better (not to mentioned happier customers) to find out as early as possible before you find out in the production system if there is slow responsiveness or the site crashes. This should lead to faster releases since you won't be dealing with issues from the previous release.
6. Saves you money. It’s time consuming and expensive to fix system degradations in production causing errors, slow performance or worse...your site to crash. The team has to redirect their focus to the issue and spend time fixing the issues. It can interrupt development, qa, operations, product, support...really the entire product development team. Depending on how long it takes to fix can mean losing thousands of dollars in revenue and possibly customers. Running load tests to find these issues can save your company money by finding these issues early before they hit production.
7. Better focus.  It's better to fix issues on your own time during business hours, instead of when you're in production and management is asking questions.  Finding issues early leads to a more streamlined delivery process.
   

Start load testing now!  Testery can help guide your workflow and help scale and run your load tests.