The successful deployment of a new enterprise or e-commerce application of course depends on it being functionally fit for purpose. However, if it offers poor performance to your users or customers, or cannot provide reliable service when put under load, then the application deployment project will be deemed a failure - and an expensive one at that!

All too often, organisations focus their testing efforts for a new application purely on its functional aspects, and do little or no testing of its performance or scalability. As a result, at the point of deployment across a network, organisations do not have a sufficiently thorough level of understanding of how an application will perform from a user perspective, or how effectively the system will scale to meet user and traffic growth. As a result, significant risks will be taken as to whether business objectives and demands of your users or customers will be met from day-one or not. Once deployed, system performance and scalability issues can be extremely complex and expensive to resolve.

The answer is to conduct load-testing as an integral part of the application or systems pre-deployment test program. Load-testing aims to automate the process of simulating the anticipated number of users or customers running the application under test, and to measure the transactional performance of the application system at varying levels of load. The only viable alternative would be to populate the system with the anticipated number of users and to manually monitor and measure performance for each user - a concept that is usually impractical and overtly expensive.