Load Testing Early and Often with VSTS

I have blogged about testing early, getting your test team involved at the start of the project one item I neglected to include was Load testing. So let’s catch up and talk about when load testing should be done. A lot of projects wait till either UAT or just prior to implementation to perform Load testing, does that make sense?

What is Load Testing?  --  It is the process of creating demand on a system or devise and measuring its response. It is modeling the expected usage of a software program by simulating multiple users accessing the program’s services concurrently.  

With VS Team System Load Tester you are grouping and running your existing unit and web tests. When a build is ready the unit tests are run against that build. We are verifying the build quality and regression testing that any fixes made did not break something else. The QA team gets a quality build and run their web and manual tests and report any bugs. If the bug’s reported are not high severities then let’s put the unit and web tests into a load test and run it. You’ll have to do some planning ahead like a clean environment and data set up for the load testing. An important factor during load testing is having an appropriate data size to find issues like missing indexes, to many indexes, locks, bad query plans, the list goes on and on.

Load testing early will find performance issues sooner which in most instances are due to architectural issues in the application. Finding these just before implementation can turn into a No Go decision. Finding them early allows lots of time to analyze and make the necessary changes, and you can retest the fix without delaying other testing, development or implementation.

This is a best practice that with VS Team System allows us to do so easily it’s crazy not too.

Quote by Andy Warhol (1928-1987): “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Lets change Load Testing start early don’t leave it till the end.

Enjoying a sunny summer … Testa J