Choose Your Weapon: The Performance Testing Arsenal

Your app works great on your laptop, in the dev environment. Then production hits 10x expected traffic during a marketing campaign and everything falls apart. Or maybe not, instead six months of data accumulates, causing the response times to be painfully slow. Load testing, stress testing, soak testing, and spike testing, they all sound similar, but address completely different problems, and most teams only do one, if at all.

This talk breaks down the essential types of performance testing every app and web developer should understand. Learn when to use each approach, what problems they uncover, and how to integrate them into your development workflow without drowning in complexity. We’ll cover real-world scenarios where each testing type saves production systems, helping you choose the right weapon for your performance battles.

What you’ll learn:
– The differences between load, stress, soak, and spike testing, and when each matters
– Which performance testing types reveal which production problems, before they happen
– How to integrate performance testing into CI/CD without slowing down development and deployments
– Practical criteria for deciding which tests your application actually needs