The aftermath

It was a long night at BaySoft Training Inc. corporate office. How did this happen? Could this have been avoided? Why was the application and system not able to handle the load? Why weren't adequate performance and stress tests conducted on the system and application? Was it an application problem, a system resource issue or a combination of both? All of these were questions management demanded answers to from the group of engineers, which comprised software developers, network and system engineers, quality assurance (QA) testers, and database administrators gathered in the WAR room. There sure was a lot of finger pointing and blame to go around the room. After a little brainstorming, it wasn't too long for the group to decide what needed to be done. The application and its system resources will need to undergo extensive and rigorous testing. This will include all facets of the application and all supporting system resources, including, but not limited to, infrastructure, network, database, servers, and load balancers. Such a test will help all the involved parties to discover exactly where the bottlenecks are and address them accordingly.