If you’re here on the Gatling blog I’m going to assume you’re interested in load testing and hopefully are already using our load testing tool in your organization as your load testing tool. Maybe, though, you’ve just discovered Gatling or load testing and are only using it on certain projects or for certain phases of the development process and you’ve noticed there are other departments or projects that could benefit by implementing Gatling as well.
This is a quick post to explain what projects can benefit from load testing and how to spread the adoption of Gatling from your current project across your organization. Let’s jump in with a little bit about the “what”, “who” and “why” of load testing first!
What projects should be using load testing?
Load testing ensures the performance and reliability of an organization’s websites and applications. It involves features like simulating real-world traffic conditions and measuring how well the system can handle the load. You of course already know this but the basic message above is that any web application that can expect traffic should be load tested to ensure that it can handle that traffic and still provide a great user experience.
Who should be involved in load testing?
So we know that you believe in load testing, and that’s awesome, but how do you involve your organization and ensure load testing for all projects becomes the standard? The best way to spread awareness of the importance of load testing is to involve as many stakeholders as possible in the testing process. Involving marketing, project managers, and other departments rather than just the engineering divisions allows you to get different perspectives on how users use an application. You guessed it: involving all teams will help you build better load tests!
Aside from just building better tests, it helps deliver load testing knowledge and awareness throughout your organization. This way, when a new project is started, it won’t just be the QA, devs, and site reliability engineers considering load and performance testing.
How to make it standard?
Like any practice in development, it depends on your position. Let’s take a look at some specific roles and see how each one can go about increasing knowledge of load testing to ensure it is used in future projects.
Project Managers
This is the easy one. If you’re in charge of the project, you should implement Gatling into your CI/CD process as early as feasible. When the project is completed, show your success to other departments and others will follow.
Site reliability engineers
Another easy choice. Site reliability engineers are the backbone of performance testing and generally get to use their choice of tools. Can you guess which tool we recommend? (Gatling of course). Collaborate with other engineers and developers, teach them your knowledge and you’ll soon find load testing usage increasing.
Software Developers
If you’re a developer and are a Gatling user, the best way to spread the knowledge of the solution is to make your previous work accessible. Give other developers access to your testing repository to see your code and how you can build strong crash-proof applications. By allowing others to see what you’ve done, soon they’ll be able to do it themselves.
Marketing
Marketing and load testing, what? We’re actually serious about this.
Having an application that is fast and won’t crash is an absolute necessity to keep your users satisfied and reduce churn/turnover. Make it known that you’ve done performance testing, collaborate with the people who built your application, and tell your story! Create case studies and social posts about the hard work that your developers and site reliability engineers have put in to build something that will meet user demands even during high traffic.
Conclusion
By following these practices, organizations can effectively spread load testing throughout their organization using Gatling as their load testing tool. This will help ensure that their websites and applications can handle the traffic and workloads they will encounter in the real world, and it will help prevent performance issues that could impact the user experience. Increasing communication and cross-functionality between teams and sharing knowledge is how great products and standard practices are built.
So what are you waiting for, get started and spread load testing for all!
