Introduction

Nowadays, time to market is critical, and we have several solutions to reduce it:

• Agile methods
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• DevOps, etc

Load testing must support these changes. As a consequence, we need to test earlier and often.

The first point to consider is that the earlier the tests are performed, the better it is.

Indeed, a bug discovered early in a project life cycle:

• Is easier to fix since it is ideally fixed within the development phase. Fixing a bug during the integration phase means digging into more layers to find the root cause, which leads to higher costs.
• Costs less than a production bug, as it does not impact customers. Think of a bug on pricing as an illustration.

The second point to consider is that tests must be performed at all stages of the application's life cycle: from development to integration, to production.

This approach of testing earlier is called Shift-Left, and it can naturally be applied to load testing.

To reach these...