Load test design

While some aspects of testing, such as exploratory and user experience testing, require manual steps, most testing should be automated, and some, such as load testing, absolutely require it. There are many tools available to produce these kinds of requests, such as LoadNinja or WebLOAD, so if they are suitable for your application, I recommend using one of those to get started quickly and see what is possible.

If your application requires other protocols or you want more control over the load test behavior, you can prepare your own scripts. While they may appear as simple as looping through some fixed behaviors, writing a good load script is deceptively complex, so check on the plugins and extensions available in other tools. Many are also open source, so you can take a branch to customize them.

First, we will consider the case of a client-server architecture in which you are load testing the server, such as a web application or mobile application connecting...