No longer a pre-production nice to have when time and budget afforded the luxury, Load Testing has become the QA practice lynchpin. Of course, you can’t talk about load testing without consideration for the influence Agile, DevOps, and Cloud computing has had on the evolution.

Whatever the case, the ever-increasing share of digital technology continues to drive companies to accelerate the pace of delivery. And, as each release brings richer functionality – a more sophisticated user experience, this crossroad of application reliability and speed not only validates the need, it prompts the load testing effort to continue to outdo itself.

Let’s take a deeper dive into these and other emerging trends reshaping modern performance and load testing practices today.

1. Automated CI/CD Integration Stresses an Earlier Shift Left
2. Application Performance Monitoring Creates a Counter-Shift (Right)
3. Cloud-readiness When You Need it
4. Devices, Devices Everywhere, / Enough for All to Drink
5. Taking the Machine’s Word for it

1.  Automated CI/CD Integration Stresses an Earlier Shift Left

Testing early and often refers to the benefits of testing throughout the software lifecycle. Realizing the benefits of this shift left in performance testing involves early component development, integrated testing for groups of components, and system-wide testing before deploying the application into a production environment. To keep up with today’s torrid pace of continuous “everything,” load testing has to be faster and flawless in its ability to validate application performance under load during every step of the test cycle.

To illustrate this Shift Left embrace, the QA has increased its incorporation of automated load testing, as early on in the development process as possible. There’s even a growing trend amongst test engineers to achieve short bursts of low-volume load tests as code deploys throughout the sprint vs. performing intensive end-state load testing as the last step during pre-production release.

Every Shift Left goal is to uncover issues early on; resulting in immediate SFDC resolution when it is less costly than the downstream reconciliation tenet of the waterfall methodology.

2. Application Performance Monitoring Creates a Counter-Shift (Right)

The yang to the Shift Left yin is Shifting Right. What’s most interesting about the effort, however, is that it’s not humans who are responsible for the shifting; it’s the technology.

Today, more and more companies are using Automated Performance Monitoring technology to watch the code in production. So, while companies Shift Left to load test during development as they conduct essential full-scale, regression load testing just before release to production, they will employ Automated Performance Monitoring to the active code such that it meets the requirements associated with the Service Level Agreement.

With the volume of “live” code on the Internet today, Automated Performance Monitoring is the scalable solution to ensure that everything is running as it should.

3. Cloud-readiness When You Need it

The fruits of cloud-based computing are now available in the testing domain. With a taste of the value and commitment to maintaining the pay on consumption model, companies rely more heavily on their service providers to dynamically provision the testing infrastructure required to meet any testing scenario at-hand.

In contrast to the notion of dynamic provisioning is the reality that not all service providers are capable of providing the appropriate testing environment, while available tools and workflow requirements are too specialized. The reality is, today’s state-of-the-art testing service option at scale absence WILL give way to a crop of companies whom will fulfill this need.

4. Devices, Devices Everywhere, / Enough for All to Drink

According to Forbes, since 2014, Smart Phone sales have doubled that of non-phone devices. Meanwhile, Business Insider predicts that in 2018, IoT will prove more significant than the smartphone, tablet, and PC markets combined.

With smarter automobiles and wearable devices, the transmission and consumption of data are taking the digital world to levels that were previously unimaginable. The pervasiveness of all these devices and the endpoints to which they transmit data, only begets the need for more testing. Companies are going to have to continually reinvent their testing approaches so that they work seamlessly with these new devices. Fact, load testing in the IoT infrastructure will need to go beyond traditional methodologies as the nature and scope of performance are different.

Device growth, the demands of the companies using them are going to require regular test strategy and execution tuning – there are really few options otherwise.

5. Taking the Machine’s Word for it

Don’t get me wrong, companies have been adapting to some of the phenomena already. In particular, we’re seeing some become avid forward-thinkers when it comes to the incorporation of AI during their load testing.

Automation testing growth has also spurred the volume of production and test result data available for analysis. The volume of data has hit a threshold that the only way to make sense of it all is to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. AI and Machine Learning are particularly useful when it comes to anticipating potential failure events and scaling up the environment to avoid disaster. Although the final chapters associated with all of the possibilities of AI are still being written, it is undoubtedly an indispensable domain of interest near and mid-term for performance engineers. If nothing else though, companies understand the benefit of using AI in the testing landscape and will be using it more to meet the growing demand to maintain 24/7 up-time.

Putting it All Together

At the core of these emerging load testing industry trends is the demand for the performance engineer to devise new ways to meet increasing expectation for fast, reliable delivery of a flawless user experience. The companies who recognize the value of an established set of load testing best practices will outpace the competition.