How can you save money through automated testing?

Better, faster, more. That’s what a lot of us are doing to keep up with our own market. Modern agile development isn’t an exception and emphasizes pushing out faster releases during the software development lifecycle.?

The thing is, the faster you go, the more errors you tend to make. How do you avoid that? We might have the answer you’re looking for.?

Load testing determines the resilience of a system, your website or app for instance, under heavy traffic. It allows you to know your web application better, where the bottlenecks are, and what you should work on for a high-performance product. Basically, a load testing tool will tell you how your website will react with 50 people arriving at the same time.?

?Let’s start with the basics: why do you need load testing??(Yes, you need it)?

Why should I load test my web application?

Because, like every other business, you want to grow through satisfied customers, which means you’ll need to avoid downtime.?

Downtime is the time that your website/service spends offline. It can be caused by server overload or insufficient resources to handle the traffic that you’re receiving. Long story short, you can easily be the victim of your own success, and we want to avoid that, don’t we??

That’s when load testing comes into play. A load testing solution helps identify flaws during development before they become real issues on your website. I see you, you think it only happens to huge companies and your business is safe. Well, let me ask you this: can you be sure of your website performance with ten new users per minute? How about a hundred new users per second??

Downtime is one of the worst scenarios that can happen, but other minor incidents could make you lose potential users or revenue such as slow load times for your website or tech issues in your production environment (in the end, not so minor). For instance, following several studies (DigitalCommerce360, TheSearchEngineGuys), we found that:

Still not convinced? How about a 53% website visitors loss for a 3-second loading speed? That’s a huge percentage for 3 little seconds (BCCInteractive).

Ok, I’m on board. Tell me more about load testing.

In traditional software development, testing was done at the end of a project, prior to release. Whether we are talking about functional (is it working?) or performance testing (how well is it working?), all tests would be performed at the end of the development cycle.?

As you can see from our previous examples, there are better moves than waiting passively during the development process as you might miss some real damaging issues: we’re only human, we can’t see everything.?

All things said, your future favorite tactic to avoid this kind of unexpected errors is continuous shift-left testing.

Testing what, when, where?

That’s where we’re becoming a bit technical, but just a bit (don’t go).?

When I said testing, I was thinking of Shift-Left Testing, aka where you start testing as early as possible in your project in order to identify potential problems as soon as they arrive, and correct them immediately. The best way to do this is to implement a CI/CD strategy into your development pipeline that includes testing. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Let me tell you first about the benefits of Shift-Left testing:

Now that we know what a shift-left testing strategy is and how it drives your product performance, let’s talk about automation.

We’re almost done.

CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment or Delivery) is a strategy that can help you achieve better results quickly. Testing in this kind of process means that your team is constantly running tests in short cycles. This allows you to be sure everything you release is stable, resilient, and scalable.

Let’s see how it works. Each cycle begins with a developer sending their latest changes (=committing code) to the central storage place (=main repository).?

On each commit, the code is run through a series of automated tests. If all tests pass, the code goes to the production environment. If any of the tests fail, the results of the testing are reported back to the developer. They make changes and try again until all the tests are passed.

In a continuous delivery strategy, load tests are used to ensure the application can handle the expected traffic. The goal here is to identify potential performance issues, and bugs before they happen in production.

Quick words before you leave

We all dream of fast growth and new business opportunities. We also might not know how much traffic our application can withstand, and success can rapidly become a nightmare.

A shift-left testing vision is essential if you want to create a long-term performance-driven strategy. It allows you to prepare for anything during development, causing lower stress levels for your team, and ensuring you can grow without having to think about possible performance issues.?

At Gatling, we’re here to assist you in implementing a load testing strategy, allowing you to identify and correct issues during development. Load-testing is great and your teams can handle it well, but you might also want to check what’s going on in there… That’s why we have our Enterprise solution, a management interface with colorful graphs, comparison tools, CI/CD integrations, team management features, and advanced metrics that are easy to follow.?

Basically (and humbly), we want to be the best ally you can have for your future success in the digital world by proposing a solution designed specifically for your needs. If you plan to grow tomorrow, get in touch today and see how we can help you shift-left.