8.2. The Importance of Performance Testing

When developing web applications, one of your goals should be to have extremely happy clients, not just happy clients, clients who will rant and rave about the quality of the application that was delivered. Web applications that generate errors or have a poor response time make for customers that are frustrated or upset. In recent years developers have seen an increase of business applications that were originally developed as "client/server" or "thick client" applications moving to the web. Some call this phenomenon the Semantic Web or Web 2.0. Call it what you will but this phenomenon has changed how web applications need to be created.

Users of these types of applications expect the newly adapted web applications to perform as well and as reliably as their desktop counterparts. In the past the web has had a reputation of being "slow and clunky," whereas the "thick client" applications were "mean and lean." With the advancement of broadband connections and technologies such as AJAX, web applications are no longer "slow and clunky."

Performance testing can be considered the forgotten second cousin of unit testing. Most developers put this type of testing off until the very last minute, if they even get to it at all. Performance issues tend to have a habit of turning up late in the application cycle, and the later that you find them the greater the cost. Studies have shown that most performance defects are "firefighting" defects, meaning ...

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