It is often said that “it’s always the baker’s children who have no bread”. In this very interesting article, Ed Glas explains how Microsoft manage the load testing efforts for its Visual Studio Online tool based on a Cloud architecture.
Visual Studio Online is developed in 3 week sprints. At the end of each sprint,the service is validates and then deployed during the first week of the following sprint. This verification week dedicated only to perform the final verification before deployment.
Load testing is a critical part of their software development process and load tests are run regularly throughout a sprint. The load testing process is based on set of “scripts” that target different layers of the product’s architecture, depending on the subsystem they are targeting. Web tests are used to drive load to the Web site and Web pages, and “unit” tests to drive load to the Web services. The script test mix and load patterns are varied to suit the purpose of each load test. The article explains in details and with examples the different types of load tests and their purpose. it also outlines the type of load patterns and test mix we use.
Ed Glas conclusion is that “Regularly running load tests is critical to maintaining a high level of quality during our sprints and deploying every three weeks.”
Read the complete article on http://blogs.msdn.com/b/edglas/archive/2013/11/27/load-testing-visual-studio-online.aspx