Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “performance testing”
Load Testing is Not an Academic Problem
For Rowan University, ensuring that their students can get registered for classes is not an academic problem. If errors or system crashes prevent students from getting into the classes they need, it can have a serious impact on their academic careers, potentially even resulting in additional educational costs. So when the IT wizards at Rowan were planning significant upgrades to their hardware and the Banner 9 software from Ellucian to ensure the best possible experience for their students, they knew load testing was an essential part of the project.
Load Test Early!
Customers occasionally ask us “How early should we begin load testing?”
The answer is to test something, anything, as soon as the architecture is available. Performance problems have a wide variety of causes – from a single line of code to a load balancer setup; from a database schema to a server config file. Early in the development of the software you can catch simple coding problems and fundamental architectural limitations that are much easier to fix before a lot of code has been written.
Now, a word of caution: Testing against a scaled-down development or … Continue reading »
Performance Starts with the Developers
Performance starts with the developers as well as the server and network administrators. High-capacity websites do not happen by accident. To perform well and scale big, the system must be designed, built and configured for performance. That means it must be coded and configured with performance in mind, right from the start. Make sure the developer and admins all understand the levels to which the system must perform. Don’t make them guess what “it has to be fast” means.
Two of the most important tasks the test and project management teams to can do to help:
Identify the performance goals for the … Continue reading »
Load Testing Fallacies: The Test Scenarios Must Be Completely Accurate
Last time, I talked about why it is ok to start testing early in the development process. I’m going to continue that thought process to discuss load testing without complete performance requirements. This Load Testing 101 article says “If the real end user is going to do work with your application in a totally different way than you test you are as good as with no testing at all.” While there is a nugget of truth hidden in there, it is easy to take away the wrong understanding.
One interpretation of that statement would be that “you must have … Continue reading »