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Skipping Load Testing is a Dangerous Choice
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In 1948, Indian Motorcycles asked my father if he wanted to be a dealer for them. The rest is history. I grew up riding dirt bikes, racing at field events, and rebuilding a few classic cycles. My dad always wore a helmet and made sure I did too. Sometimes the helmet he gave me wasn't very cool, but I was sure it was best for me because he told me stories of guys that didn't wear them.
Sad news caught my eye today about a guy protesting the helmet law in New York. Unfortunately, while he was riding in a rally he lost control of his Harley, flipped over the handlebars, and hit his head on the pavement. He didn't survive the crash. State troopers determined that he would not have died with a cracked skull if he had been wearing his helmet.
Two things come to mind:
- Legislation doesn't always work.
- He made a choice that was costly in the end.
How does this motorcycle helmet situation relate to load testing? It's simple:
Every day web developers make the decision that load and stress testing is NOT necessary for their site or application.
Yeah, and you can ride without a helmet too. It's just a bad idea. The risk is too great.
Performance of your site has a direct correlation to your success. Slow sites lose revenue. Sites crash under heavy traffic every day because they got a favorable review on Slashdot. Unexpected volume comes from unlikely sources and blindside your company. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and hundreds of other social media sites can immediately pour tens of thousands of users to your URL. How will your site handle it?
If you don't load test, you won't know. If you don't measure the performance of your system under large traffic, then you will have no opportunity to tune it to make it more scalable.
If you ignore the facts about load testing, then you will pay the price - some day and some way. I strongly recommend that you run a stress test against your system to see when and where it breaks.
Work with your marketing team to figure out their goals for large volume. Share with them real metrics regarding the number of concurrent users or the requests per second or the throughput that your site can handle. It's not that hard, really!
The hardest part is investing the time. Okay, maybe it's harder to talk to marketing people. It must be done though - even if you don't like it.
That guy riding a motorcycle didn't like to wear a helmet either. Get over your resistance to load testing and just do it. The upside is too important to ignore.
Consider it good insurance.
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Comments
Hi Scott, At which point do
Hi Scott,
At which point do you start thinking the load? Almost all software projects do test the performance and with the tools used in those kinda tests it's quite easy to run at least some load tests. If you had to choose whether to do functional testing or invest the time in load testing, which pays off? Is it more convinient to have have a non-working software instead of being prepared for "coulda-mighta" situations?
I always plan my testing in such way that we do early load testing to component and E2E load testing to complement the testing. We might find bottlenecks where we thought there were none with component level load testing. My opinion is that performance and load testing ALWAYS pay back what we invested into them. If not as defects or problems but as information regarding the test object at hand.
Good metaphor with the helmet and rider, by the way. As a motorist myself I root for wearing helmets. I mean going 80 mph bare headed is all fun and games, but when things go wrong you wish you had your kettle. ;)
Excellent points Pekka. It is
Excellent points Pekka.
It is very commendable that you load test early in the software development cycle. I have asked questions from rooms full of QA engineers and software testers (e.g. CAST 2010), and more than 90% say they wait until the last few days of the project to do any load testing.
In fact, less than 50% in my surveys indicate that they do any performance testing before releasing the product. More than half of all web applications enter production without a load test. That's why we continue to see websites crashing because even Fortune 100 global retailers should have load tested before launching a new product line!
You are a unique and gifted individual in the software/web development industry. My hat is off to you my friend because you are an inspiration to those that don't understand, "that performance and load testing ALWAYS pay back what we invested into them." Wise words indeed.
Thank you for sharing your comment!