Load testing is crucial in software development and setup, as without it, you will have no proof of your software being capable of dealing with the load it is designed to work under. Ignoring load testing is like creating a car from scratch, putting it out of the factory, and giving it to a customer without even trying to understand its reliability, how you have to maintain it, and what the prospected life expectancy of such a car is in real life using conditions. How such a case will end? With a frustrated customer.
So, in software development, it works the same with load testing services. As we all understand, modern businesses highly rely on different software solutions that are used to automate and optimize internal and external business processes — from supply chain management and resource management to customer service and sales. Thus, having your software systems crushed in an unexpected moment may cause serious harm to your business, not only in money but also in lost customers who will be dissatisfied with your inability to solve their problems here and now.
In such a case, we all understand load testing is mandatory. Nevertheless, the question remains — can you do it yourself or should look for software testing services provided by an outsourced team?
We have the answer.
What is load testing, and how does it work?
Load testing is a software testing method that is used to find imperfections in software optimization in the area of its ability to withstand high load that is similar to real life conditions of peak periods of software use. This means this method pushes software apps to their limits in order to figure out their breaking point and performance under high load.
There are many different methods of load testing, which include concurrent load testing, spike load testing, stress load testing, and so on. You have to be qualified enough to define which method suits your exact situation the most and which will be the most representative. This requires understanding the purpose of your software app, its key processes, integrations, and protocols it uses to operate, and its architecture too.
Can I do load testing on my own?
In short, yes, you can. The other side of the coin is that the efficiency of such load testing and the informative quality of its results will remain poor unless you are a qualified software developer with years of expertise and dozens of real cases. There are even free applications and protocols to process load testing on your own, but what would be the point?
Let us describe to you in detail why load testing without an experienced team and software is useless:
- It requires knowledge — software testing is an extremely complex process. Each aspect of the software has its own performance rates, like API interface has QPS and latency, while databases or servers use absolutely different performance metrics to test their effectiveness and stability. Without all this knowledge, you can’t diagnose your software, and the information you will get will just be unable to be interpreted.
- It requires software — for load testing, experienced IT teams use specific, very expensive, and complex software that is designed exactly for such cases. You still won’t be able to get the most out of such software even if you have it, because again, it requires knowledge to use such tools effectively.
- It requires experience — experienced IT specialists with expertise in load testing will understand the problem and find the root cause a hundred times faster than inexperienced users. They have an eagle eye on such things as they work with similar cases on an everyday basis. Outsourcing load testing will save you not only money on software and other tools but also time – putting aside that professionals will do load testing much more accurately and provide you with turnkey solutions to the problems they could find.
What are the benefits of professional load testing?
- Ensured scalability options — professional load test services will provide you with real scalability options, verified by specialists.
- Breaking point detection — you will find out where is the limit of your software and figure out options to optimize load.
- Guaranteed stability — optimization after professional services of load testing will help you stay sure that your software will work stably.
- Incident-free — load testing will help you make sure no unexpected incidents will interrupt the stable operation of your system.
- Lower costs — optimization always finds ways to optimize operational costs.
Conclusion
As we have explained, load testing is extremely essential for any software development project. You can’t start using your software and automate business processes with it without processing a load test. But many people, even though they know how complex this process is, still wonder whether they can try providing a load test on their own. We can provide you with a short answer — yes, you can do load testing on your own, but it will be totally ineffective.
First of all, it requires deep expertise, experience and hard skills to do load testing properly — there are too many methods of this testing process for an inexperienced man to do it correctly from the first try. Secondly, it is much easier and in result cheaper to outsource load testing. Choose a reliable partner, like PFLB, and don’t worry about your business software success.
