The basics of the whole thing

Ok, now that this blog is all about Load Testing, let’s not go about beating the bush and get on with the building blocks in simple terms.

Let’s just say some product company or a commercial website company comes up with a new application. Now according to software methodologies and all that loads of jargons in the industry, there could be three tiers in the overall architecture. The first tier is what we get to access, the front-end, the beautiful colorful userfriendly interface that you’d work with as the end-user. The second tier is the place where all the business logic is stored, the brain behind the application, hidden from you. The third tier is the data-store, which feeds the mid-tier and gets from it, the data pertaining to the application – this will be the innermost block of all. After all data is supposed to be critical and secure, right?

All these blocks together have to be perfect, oh did I say perfect?, close to perfect to make this application act good in your hands. So, that will mean we check if the individual blocks do what they are supposed to do, and if they talk friendly to each other and are behaving themselves. This tough part is done by the functional testers, the enthusiastic and patient folks.

Then comes the easier part, the application is alive and kicking and the blocks interact well with each other but are we sure that they are going to behaving well with us, the end-users? Mind you, we are Gods in this context (most companies have customer is god policy, luckily for us), so we are not going to like it if the application takes a long time to respond to us, or if it gives us that devilish message saying that the server is unavailable. So the company’s got to ensure that the application is friendly to humans as well!

And that’s what performance testing is all about. We check if the blocks are communicating faster, and can handle the scores of different homo-sapiens who keep demanding data from the application, without running out of energy and food supply. Oh yes, also that the human user gets a response within an expected time-frame. Now, that doesn’t look tough, does it?