Why IT Leaders Should Consider Load Testing in DevOps

Recently, a major reliability issue had affected a large organization in Minnesota. This organization had overlooked quality issues and ran into a cyberattack that put thousands of credit records and their owners at risk. Forward-thinking companies have transformed their development chain, integrated security, and delivered well-performing applications by load testing in early development stages.

In this post we will outline why non-functional viewpoints such as user volume, arrival rates, and response time are becoming an increasingly fundamental part of many software projects.

  1. Risk Mitigation

There is always a high risk that an application can’t handle real-world user and data volume. In the worst-case scenario, an application will crash on the first day of production due to serious performance issues. Load testing is a proven risk mitigation measure because it validates your new services under production-like load conditions and reduces the risk of services being affected by reliability problems.

  1. Time to Market

Speed rules the world. Those who launch their new products often experience a reduction in revenue. Load testing helps you to prove your new system under production-like conditions early in the development lifecycle. The earlier you identify hotspots; the easier they are to fix and effectively reduce the risk of delay.

  1. Defect Costs

Performance issues are often difficult to solve because they typically originate in application design. If you eliminate performance hotspots during implementation or testing stages, you save up to 90 percent of the resource expenditure for each bug due to early detection and remediation. Ultimately, it is far easier and more cost-effective to modify the code early in development.

  1. Firefighting

Imagine that your company started a marketing program for the new website, and on day one, a few hundred potential customers can’t use the new platform due to severe performance issues. Nobody wants to be in such a scenario because suddenly the engineering work stops, and the investigation phase begins. The pressure goes up, and there is a high risk that they are unable to fix issues in production within a short amount of time. Load testing prevents your organization from mission-impacting scenarios.

  1. War Rooms

Due to the high pressure of serious slowdowns, your teams may start blaming each other. Nobody wants to be responsible for this disaster. Less transparency across all units makes it impossible to identify the cause of performance issues. Load tests during pre-production stages will give you enough time to investigate and fix slowdowns,insulate you from high pressure fire drills, and finger pointing.

  1. User Experience

Clients expect fast and reliable websites. According to recent research, if page load times are four seconds or above, half ofusers will stop using those services. Load testing helps you to validate and improve user experience on pre-production stages. Once UX is within the agreed boundaries, you have the confidence to deploy the new product into production.

  1. Financial Revenue

Slow websites lead to increasing abandonment rates and loss of commercial revenue. Imagine that your company allocated money for implementation of the new platform, started a tremendous marketing campaign, and due to slow IT services, you ended up putting this important project at risk. It’s far less expensive to integrate load tests in your development cycle and eliminate those nasty slowdowns instead of risking problems with your bottom line.

  1. Reputation

Reputation is essential for your products. If websites are not reliable or fail to deliver their intended services, your brand is in danger. Even if you bring your application up to speed, those customers who experienced a slow loading website will harbor this negative experience for a long time. Validation of performance requirements during construction stages reduces the risk of reputation damage due to under-performing services.

Don’t set your growing business at risk. Follow the path of successful IT leaders and make load testing a fundamental part of your development chain. Fewer slowdowns – less troubles – happy customers.