Top 6 Best Load Testing Practices

During the process of load test, testing the software application helps to measure the capacity of the web application. Hence load testing can be used as a tool like the load testing tool to get the works done. Therefore load testing is mainly a process of putting simulated demand on the software, website, or an application in such a way that the test illustrates its behavior under different conditions. In this article, a detailed overview has been provided about load testing, the importance of load testing, and the load testing best practices.

What is Load Testing?

Load testing refers to the process of developing production simulations within an application or the system that are as near as possible to being a finished product and hence it is deployed. Therefore, making the use of specialized testing software load testing allows the software developers’ teams to answer the most asked questions. Load testing can also identify page load issues, system lag, or bombard a system with sudden traffic things.

Why is Load Testing Important?

Load testing is important as it helps to make sure that the applications can perform as expected in production.

• It is a completely different process for example, if the application passes the functional test it doesn’t need to perform in the same way in the load testing process.
• Load testing helps to identify when and where the application breaks so that the developers can fix issues before shipping to production.
• Businesses mainly depend on digital applications for their critical functions therefore it is important to validate that they can withstand realistic load scenarios.

Load Testing vs Stress Testing

Performance testing is the most commonly used testing, Load testing particularly involves applying ordinary stress to an IT system or software application to view if it can perform as needed under normal conditions.

1. Load testing makes sure that the given function, system, or program can handle the things it is designed to handle whereas stress testing is a process of overloading things until they break.
2. Stress testing is mainly useful for preparing for the unexpected and determining how long and far a system can be pushed. Therefore both testing practices play an important role in determining how well the software can deal with the actual loads.

How to Start Load Testing?

By following the below-mentioned steps load testing can be started and performed smoothly

1. Needs to gather the requirements: The first thing that needs to be done is gather the requirements such as the most critical functionalities that need to be tested and the shapes needed for the end-user experience.
2. Map out the required user journeys: Identify the way how the users are interacting with the applications and this will help to leverage the monitoring data from any APM tools that can be used.
3. Develop a baseline: For running the tests a solid baseline is needed to test the applications.
4. Integrate and automate: Lastly prioritize the process of load testing as a part of CI/CD processes and integrate with the tools.

What are Load Testing Best Practices?

Multiple load-testing practices are used by the developers. Some of the most important load testing best practices are mentioned below:

Top 6 Best Load Testing Practices

1. Develop Realistic Scenarios

Developing realistic scenarios is one of the main practices in load testing as it includes the process of thinking like a user such as What applications are critical for the users? Do the users use multiple devices? Therefore by developing realistic load tests the businesses closely understand how the application behaves or would behave in production with the real users. This practice helps to read the minds of real users to a certain extent.

2. Test Early and Regularly

Whether the team is adapting an agile or DevOps or shift left mentality it is important to test early and regularly. Therefore frequent performance testing should be started when a development project is all over. Hence, in the past few years, the increase in the amount of feedback throughout the software development life cycle has proved valuable in finding and fixing the issues rapidly.

3. Set Realistic Benchmarks

Optimizing the performance requires a deep understanding of the applications and their users. Identifying practical and realistic tests can reflect the reality whether it means selecting browsers, devices, number of users, and so on. Therefore in the real world, it is unlikely that the systems that are looking to update will not be running under the load already.

4. Leverage the Real-life Data

To successfully achieve realistic scenarios and benchmarks leverage the data which is already there. Reusing the data with the help of monitoring tools helps to illuminate what “realistic” completely means in some specific cases. Therefore in most cases monitoring the tools is running them from a proactive and reactive point of view.

5. Analyze the Test Data

While running and after running the data the first step is to identify the problem areas and take necessary steps to improve them which particularly means correlating performance bottlenecks with the code to isolate the root cause of the problem. Sometimes it is difficult if the business is using traditional testing tools as it needs to translate the test results into the metrics to leverage and share with the development team and to find out the issues.

6. Targeting the Right Workload

Never test your application on a large scale it is not needed to stress your platform beyond what is expected. Developers should mainly focus on evaluating the correct workload that the app will experience in production. In this load testing the workload transaction testing profile should carefully analyze the following questions- What is the goal of the test, What metric will you track, and so on?

Selecting a Load Testing Tool

Selecting a load tool is one of the important parts of load testing as it supports the team and helps the team to perform better testing practices. We already know that performance testing practices take a bit more time in the release cycle but generally, they are the success indicators in production. With the help of performance testing teams can know where the application is going to perform in production before it is deployed and due to this advantage if there are any issues then the team can fix them before going live.

Therefore whenever selecting a load testing tool make sure to choose an easy-to-use tool that can develop complex realistic load tests and scalable and accurate tools and the load testing tool should be able to integrate with the other tools that are used by the teams every day.

Conclusion

Load testing is one of the important processes of putting the simulated demand on the software, website, and applications in a way such that it tests the behavior of the software in certain conditions. Thus load testing also helps software developers identify issues like slow pages, system lag, or crashes. Therefore in this article, detailed knowledge has been provided about the load testing best practices which are mainly used by the developers to maintain the efficiency in load testing.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Load testing?

Load testing is performance testing that stimulates a real-world load or any software, website, or application. It helps to demonstrate its behavior under several conditions.

2. What is the purpose of the load test?

Load testing examines the system or software behavior during normal and high loads and determines if the software or the system can handle high loads given the high demand of end users.

3. Can load testing be automated?

Load testing can be automated as well and the users can receive real-time feedback and analyze the bottlenecks and the problems which further allows the users to make the necessary corrections if needed.

4. Is Load testing necessary?

Load testing makes sure that the application can perform as expected in production. Therefore load testing is one of the important parts to check its efficiency in the process of software production.