Load Testing - An Essential Task

Nowadays functional testing on its own is not enough. Load and performance testing are recognised as an essential part of the development process. Today's systems are multi-tier distributed systems with web and web-service interfaces. They are subject to high and unpredictable levels of demand. Testing under representative load helps to avoid disasters when systems go live.

Carrying out load testing provides many benefits including:

• Assesment of system performance, the response times and throughputs of the system.
• Confidence that when stressed, pushed very hard, the system does not fail catastrophically.
• Establishing that the system can operate for extended periods without failing.
• Measure the reliability of the system.
• Check the behaviour when concurrent activities operate on the same item.
• Investigate whether the system can scale.

Projects that do not carry out appropriate load testing are on a very risky trajectory.

Load Testing Services from SQC

Our Experience

Effective load testing is a highly demanding task. It requires special apptitudes, a wide set of skills and the use of sophisticated load testing tools. Load testing is the domain of a specialist team.

The SQC team have wide experience of delivering successful load tests that meet demanding project needs. From providing quick short term assessment of systems to working with a project to establish and operate comprehensive load test suites the team has consistently delivered successful outcomes. We have performed load tests on systems that deal with tens of thousands of transactions per hour and worked on ensuring the scalability of systems designed to support massive user populations. We have developed load tests for a wide varierty of systems including web sites, web-services and remote java services.

The more advanced load test suites we have developmed have been structured, maintainable, configurable simulations of customer / user behaviour rather than simple "record and reply" scripts. In implementing these solutions we have made full use of the tool's scripting / programming capabilities and in some cases have added additional libraries, developmed by the team, to extend the tools capabilities. We have implemented complete custom load drivers and integrated them into the tool to allow us to test unsupported protocols whilst using the tool load generator management and monitoring infrastructure.

Capabilities

We can manage load testing activities for a project from workload analysis through script development to test execution and results analysis. We can design load testing to provide:

• Performance testing.
• Stress testing.
• Endurance testing.
• Reliability asssement.
• Concurrency handling assessment.
• Scalability assessment.

Skills and technical capabilities include:

• Load testing project management.
• Workload analysis.
• Scalability and performance risk analysis.
• Load test set design.
• Load testing tool usage including LoadRunner and QA Load.
• Comprehensive advanced scripting capabilities and tool extenstions.
• Custom interface / protocol load drivers.
• System behaviour analysis and reporting.