The Relative Importance of Load Testing for Software

Our last poll wanted to determine the level of adoption of load testing tools in organizations. We asked the following question: "Do you use a tool for load / performance testing?"

I use tools for load testing 48% My organization has tools, but my project or I do not use them 20% My organization has no tools for load testing 32%

Participants: 182

Ending date: January 2011

A majority of the companies from the participants have tools, but there are still a lot of people that do not use them. Our result in this category is a little bit higher than the numbers found in an article published by IT World in August 2009 where 20 to 25% of developers where not using performance and load testing tools.

This is not surprising as many developers worry about performance only when an issue is discovered and not in a proactive manner. This is especially true when the application will not be used outside your organization. In case of performance problems, projects use mostly system tools (CPU usage, SQL query explanation) to detect where it happens and then they work on the possible cause to improve the performance The situation is different when external users have access to the software. The time is gone where banking systems could be close during the night so that batch applications could process important workloads. The Internet allows customers to access a lot of services every day at every time. This impacts the architecture and the performance requirements of the software, thus increasing also the need to make sure that applications are efficient before a performance issue could become a public disaster. The high number of load testing solutions available, both open source and commercial, confirms the importance of proactive software performance testing in a complex architecture

References:

IT World Article: Developer Tools You Don't Use � And Why You Don't Use Them

Resources:

Load Testing Section of the Software Development Articles Directory

Load Testing Section of the Software Development Tools Directory

Load testing tools directory

Software Testing Magazine

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