Why is Load Testing Important?
Load Testing ensures that your application can perform as expected in production. Just because your application will pass a functional test, this does not mean that it can perform the same under a load. Load testing identifies where and when your application breaks, so you can fix the issue before shipping to production.
Businesses and consumers rely heavily on digital applications for critical functions, so it's important to validate that it can withstand realistic load scenairos. With a higher adoption of digital applications comes higher expectations of quality, and if your application fails in production, it can become costly. According to Gartner, The average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute. That is around $300,000 per hour on average. Avoiding downtime in production is essential, and load testing helps ensure that your application is ready for production.
The ultimate purpose of load testing tools—and performance testing tools in general—are always to mitigate risk, be it risk to your software’s successful functionality, risk to your end-users’ sanity, or risk to your company’s bottom line. Naturally, all three of these are intimately intertwined, so it’s important to know how they relate to each other and where you, as a developer or tester, can intervene for the greater good. Let us dare to suggest that if you focus on mitigating the middle criterion, user sanity, the other two factors will usually fall into place, and that many load-testing issues actually boil down, in the end, more to users’ perception than to specific ideal pageload times and other technical stats.