In 2018, a major ticketing platform crashed during a high-profile concert sale. Millions of users rushed to buy tickets at the same time, overwhelming the system. Customers were locked out, transactions failed, and the company faced a lot of backlash.
The thing is, performance failures rarely happen during normal traffic. They happen during product launches, holiday sales, viral marketing campaigns, or unexpected traffic spikes, which is precisely when systems need to perform at their best.
Nowadays, speed is the baseline expectation from users. Yet many QA teams still treat performance testing as a late-stage or one-time activity. In this article, I will explain what the fundamental issue is with the way teams approach performance testing, and how to implement it in a fail-safe way.
What Is Performance Testing?
Performance testing is the process of evaluating how an application responds under different levels of workload, user activity, and system stress. The goal is to assess not only the speed, but the application's responsiveness, stability, reliability, and scalability under realistic conditions.
