The importance of performance testing

The marketing department decided that they could increase sales of product noperformo by 1000%. They arranged the prime time television slot during the Superbowl and waited for the sales to roll in.

The advert was a master piece and consumers fired up the noperformo website in their millions to be greeted with “HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error. Please email support@noperformo”. Most gave up but 200,000 consumers followed the instructions sending an email to tell noperformo their website is broken….only to be returned an undelivered mail.

The marketing was a disaster. It resulted in overloading the web server and mail server and leaving a sour taste with the consumer that the noperformo brand lacks professionalism.

So what went wrong to cause this outage?

The marketing department didn’t engage with the operations team or test teams ahead of the marketing campaign. They didn’t even consider for a minute that they would cause a problem but the website would simply cope with the extra load.

Why should they? Nothing had changed, the website had worked previously with their existing small customer base.

This is a common disconnect between business and it’s IT department. Everyone understands the importance of functional testing but not many understand the importance of performance testing.

Had the marketing department approached the operations team and understand the current usage and capacity of the infrastructure this may have been prevented. Performance tests could have been executed to understand how the infrastructure would react to difference levels of consumer demand. More infrastructure could have been added or a smaller audience been targeted.

OK so not every company will target the Superbowl to advertise but you’d be surprised just how easy it can be to overload your infrastructure.

With the influence of social media no company wants the bad exposure which can easily be caused by their website going down.