Load Test Planning

As in any type of system testing, a well-defined test plan is the first essential step to successful testing. Planning your load testing helps you to:

• Build test scenarios that accurately emulate your working environment. Load testing means testing your application under typical working conditions, and checking for system performance, reliability, capacity, and so forth.
• Understand which resources are required for testing.
  Application testing requires hardware, software, and human resources. Before you begin testing, you should know which resources are available and decide how to use them effectively.
• Define success criteria in measurable terms.
  Focused testing goals and test criteria ensure successful testing. For example, it’s not enough to define vague objectives like “Check server response time under heavy load.”

A more focused success criterion would be “Check that 50 customers can check their account balance simultaneously, and that the server response time will not exceed one minute.” Load test planning is a three-step process: