Load Testing – Considerations

Load Testing is one of the most difficult phases of development cycle – since it deals not only with the testing tools but also with the overall test infrastructure.

I suggest reading “The Ten Commandments of Load Testing” over at “My Load Test” weblog listing some of the very basic considerations on load testing.

The ones I particularly liked are:

Thou shalt have testable requirements. – Requirements specific to load testing is one of the most common pitfalls where a tester does not have any idea about the clients expectations. It helps to gather the client requirements and note them down so that they can be tested against.

Thou shalt test for the worst case. – Load Tests are generally planned for the average scenarios and not for peak ones. E.g A travel booking site may have 20 concurrent users on an average day and 100 concurrent users during vacations.

Thou shalt monitor your test environment infrastructure. – Load Testing should always be done after the application has stabilized and it should be done from a live environment. There could be many implications as far as deployment environment, hardware etc. are concerned and these factors should be carefully thought of.

Read the full post here for more details.