Organizations need their websites and applications to be competitive in the modern digital business world.
Enterprises these days don’t want to be in a position where their clients witness things like, “This page is temporarily unavailable,” “HTTP Error 503,” “this transaction cannot be performed at the time,” etc.
Rather websites and applications should be developed to provide clients with a seamless experience and speed up online business transactions. And attaining such precision requires organizations to assess their websites and applications for determining whether they can handle large traffic volumes in real-time or not.
Load testing assures that your website, software, or application functions properly and perform flawlessly to mitigate any risks during real-time scenarios. In this article, we will learn about what load testing is? What are the common mistakes made while performing load testing and how to avoid them?
Let’s begin!!
Defining Load testing
The process of running software or applications to typical and projected peak loads to gauge their responsiveness under certain circumstances is known as load testing. In load testing services, the tester gives the system the most significant task it can handle before reaching an overwhelming stage. More importantly, it enables you to uncover flaws like load balancing issues, capacity problems with the current system, and bandwidth challenges, sparing you from uncomfortable situations.
Before deploying to production, load testing lets you monitor response times, throughput rates, and resource usage levels to find these potential bottlenecks. At times, Stress testing which is a closely related practice to load tests, is also purposely implemented to cause failure in order to assist with risk analysis, and modify the code to make the application perform more gracefully.
Common Mistakes Made While Performing Load Testing
- Do not equate load testing with another practice.
Since multivariate demand is the goal of load testing, it aims at verifying a system’s performance under a simulated multi-user environment. A performance testing component evaluates a program or application’s efficiency and speed. It shouldn’t be mixed up with stress testing or functional testing.
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Know that there is a fine line Between load testing and stress testing
While stress testing involves overloading a system until it fails to assess the risk involved at the system’s breaking points, load testing guarantees that software or systems can handle the load they are intended to carry.
Through stress testing, one can examine the performance capacity limits of a system and be ready for any unforeseen slippages. It is just Similar to how functional testing differs greatly from load testing.
Their objectives, the skills required to carry them out, test scripts, tools, and technologies, and the phases they carried out within the production cycle are diverse.
Functional testing tests an application’s or system’s functions to ensure they function as intended and as intended by users.
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Don’t attempt it alone; enlist help.
Even though you are in charge of load testing, likely, you won’t be able to conduct it well because you might not be familiar with all of the system’s probable scenarios. It is always better to ask for help for better understanding. You can ask someone to give you the proper monitoring tools, guide you, or be present while performing the test. The correct way is to determine who is in charge of every component of the system.
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Don’t ignore the bugs found.
Unlike the scenario with functional testing, we can’t continue load testing when a bug gets identified. To proceed further, it needs to get fixed. E.g., ‘response time’ becomes invalid if you have identified an error. However, once an error is fixed, the system must be re-tested to gain more viable and accurate results.
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Don’t go further without knowing and studying analytics.
From your hectic testing schedule, it equally becomes essential to allocate time to analyze the data captured during the test and compare the results with the metrics. This way, one can modify metrics as they move ahead with multiple iterations of tests. The data collected helps in analyzing an application or a system relating to its:
- Output versus user load
- Turnaround time vs. user load
- Utilization of resources vs. user load
By analyzing the metrics, bugs can be easily identified and then fixed. Subsequently, you can run the tests again and align with the metrics, which may prompt you to create and run other more specific tests.
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Don’t forcefully refine the system.
In the end, no system is perfect. If examined minutely; we will likely find an error. Therefore, testing a system should be restricted until one achieves acceptable performance. After that point, rather than load testing a system to make it outperform your performance goals, it should be focused on striving to produce a system with state-of-the-art functionalities.
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Giving too much attention to response time.
Many effective performance tests can measure different metrics to get a holistic view of how an application behaves under different load conditions. Although response times are the most important load test metric, other aspects can’t be overlooked. For example, fast response times don’t come out to be relevant if an application has a high error rate.
Wrapping up!
Catering to the fierce competition and the changing requirements of customers, load testing becomes crucial. It holds many benefits that can help an organization disseminate viable services.
Since the mistakes mentioned above are easy to make, the relevant use of tools, it can be easily avoided. It’s simple to bring load tests in-house and incorporate them into your existing CI/CD process. The key is ensuring the tests mimic users and enable developers to find problems.
