The secrets to an effective DevOps team are communication and collaboration. This is especially true in load testing.

 The #1 best practice we recommend with your regular load testing is to set pass/fail triggers with your automated build processes. (We’ve talked about that elsewhere. [[linkto CircleCI article etc.]]) As part of those triggers, failure notifications should be set up in a shared communications channel.

Tl;dr — We're hosting a Stockholm Software Test Talk meetup at our HQ in Stockholm. The headline of the event is "The Magic of Testing: How to load test, the developer way" by Robin Gustafsson.

No matter what the season, your e-commerce site’s performance relates directly to revenue for your company. When your site is slow - or, worse, fails - you directly lose money.

Luckily, three key types of load tests can help you fortify your site against everyday load - and seasonal peaks (like Black Friday). These three tests will make your e-commerce site perform better.

Here’s what we recommend: Baseline Tests, Stress Tests, then ongoing “TEAR” testing. 

Whether you’re new to DevOps or an experienced hand, sometimes it’s a challenge to explain the difference between performance testing and performance tuning. It happens to us, too. Here’s how we describe understanding performance testing and performance tuning.

You should have run load tests before, but now it’s time to ship and you’re under the gun. We’ve all been there.

Here’s how we recommend you get the most accurate load tests possible when you’re on a deadline: test against a reasonably realistic user behavior scenario using the LoadImpact Chrome extension.

For the most accurate load test, best practices (and common sense) dictate that your testing environment be as close to real production and user behavior as possible. We get it, though! Best practices don’t necessarily reflect the challenge and rush of a real development pipeline. For example, if you’re like us, you likely have a much larger amount of data in your production environment than in your testing and staging environment. A detailed, extremely realistic testing database is nice, but perhaps not necessary. Let us explain.

As with so many things in life, best practices in load testing apply well to optimizing your work and your workday. You can find productivity hacks anywhere, including in your load testing habits. Here’s our take:

Basic load testing is worth doing, and worth doing often. Sometimes when you’re under a deadline with your e-commerce site, all you have time for is basic testing. But we’ll explain how user scenarios will make your e-commerce site testing better.

TL;DR: Run your load tests with your nightly builds. 

Performance is essential for ecommerce sites. For every site, app or API, performance is important. But for ecommerce sites, performance translates directly to profits. Try these 3 tips for ecommerce site performance to speed your site for Black Friday and every day. Test early and save a lot of headaches later.