TRAC Research recently recorded a podcast about the key trends in the load testing market with Priya Kothari, Product Marketing Manager for HP’s Performance Validation solutions. Some of the topics covered in this podcast include: using load testing solutions to align IT with business goals, internal processes that organizations need to have in place to get the most out of their load testing solutions and the role that load testing technology plays in deploying cloud computing services.

Here are some of the key insights from the podcast:

“Finding the tools to actually do your testing is the easy part, but implementing proper load testing practices is often the hard part… In order to do a performance test you’ll need to know what the application is built for. Meaning, what is the business purpose of the applications, what will users be doing on the applications, what types of transactions will be performed and how many users will be accessing that application? You also need to know what users will be expecting from the application and what types of service level objectives should be in place and tested for. It is also important to understand what pieces of the applications are the most critical. If they have this type of information, testers can then accurately plan the testing to ensure that high priority requirements are always covered… This really helps to put an end to testing for testing sake, but rather align IT testing teams with the needs of various business stakeholders.”

“A lot of people believe that moving to the cloud actually means that you don’t have to worry about performance testing, since now they have access to unlimited hardware. What they often don’t realize is, that if the application itself is not scalable, then the elasticity of the cloud can actually cost them thousands of dollars. If the application is not scalable you will be using new machines to support the load. When moving to the cloud, it becomes even more important to test your applications and to tune them properly so they are optimized when it comes to hardware consumption… With the hybrid cloud, there is a new factor that organizations need to consider: you need to ensure that you have enough bandwidth between yourself and the cloud provider. Also, cloud vendors themselves need to start thinking about load testing. They need to test their infrastructure for specific usage conditions and ensure that they are not going to be a bottleneck.”

“Application modernization is one of the key trends that we are seeing. We are seeing more customers that are moving away from legacy technologies and move to rich internet applications, Web 2.0 and SOA-based applications, as well as frameworks such as AJAX, Flex and Silverlight. We are also seeing that some of the major application providers themselves are picking on these trends. For example, SAP is starting to use Flash, Flex and Silverlight in their latest releases. We are also seeing a browser explosion. It used to be all Internet Explorer. Now we are seeing more of Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Everyone is looking to create a richer end-user experience from using their applications to become more competitive in the marketplace.”

Click here to listen to the podcast