Load Testing

Enterprise applications or website are to simultaneously handle thousands of requests, coming from clients allover the world. In this context, testing that applications will not crash as soon as they will run in their real environment is critical.

Load testing is tricky as you have to simulate interactions between a system and its many clients without having the many clients. Consequently, load testing tools allow to define usage scenarii and create thousands of virtual users that interact with the system on the basis of these scenarii. For example, a scenario is "a user passes through the login step, selects an article and buys it online".

Test data challenges

A critical point when running load tests is to provide test data that will make the tests relevant.

Average behaviour First, the data used by the scenarii must correspond to average behaviours in order not to create particullarly favourable or unfavourable situations. For the previous example, complex security checks are likely to be performed when people pay more than 1000$. Consequently, if the data used to instantiate the scenarii are such that only cars are bought, the load test might fail despite the fact that the tested situation will never happen.

Data change Second, it is crucial that scenarii are not always instantiated with the same data. Indeed, optimization mechanisms can lead to unfair test verdicts. For example, if we instantiate the previous scenario such that the thousands of customers all buy the same book, the information concerning this book will remain in the application cache. Thus, the system will have anormally good response time.

Gain confidence in your tests

GEDIS Studio allows you to design data models and produce huge amounts of data on the basis of these data. You have a full control on the kind of data produced and on the demographic repartitions. Moreover, GEDIS Studio includes data analysis modules to let you mine your existing data and learn what the "average behaviours" are.

Using GEDIS Studio to feed your load testing tools will give you full confidence in your tests: if you pass the load testing step, your system will put up with its thousands of simultaneous requests.

Efficient Load Testing: GEDIS Studio generates customized data for your automation tests