Worried About Performance Under Load? Consider Code Analysis!

Every year, the holiday shopping rush reminds us of a fundamental truth: make sure your website performs under load.  But in the haste to perform load testing, it’s worth considering adding another equally-important arrow to your quiver: code analysis.

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For most of us, picturing the sights, sounds, and smells of the holiday season conjures up vivid memories like fresh-baked cookies, crackling fireplaces, hearty roasts, delicate pine needles, shimmering tinsel, and a brightly-wrapped array of presents—brimming with all the potential of our wildest dreams.

But ask that same question to a seasoned IT professional—especially one in the eCommerce world—and you’re likely to get a wholly different answer.  Instead of sugarplums, it’s far more likely that overloading servers, crashing websites, and swearing managers are the visions you’ll find “dancing” through their heads.

That’s because, in a lot of industries, the holidays are a critical time of year.  With the stakes this high, any kind of site outage means losing business to the competition.  And nobody feels that pressure more than the developers and QA testers on the front lines.  In some ways, the very success or failure of the entire season rests on their shoulders.

For most companies, this concern is assuaged by load testing their servers.  After all, if you can ensure your servers can withstand the brute force of heavy traffic, then you can generally count on your site staying online through the teeth of a holiday flash sale.

But is that really enough?  Sure, load testing is good and all; but how do you identify and prevent the memory leaks and security vulnerabilities that can overload your site just as quickly as traffic on a Cyber Monday blowout sale?

The truth is, if you’re really looking to bolster your site’s performance, you should be considering code analysis as well.  Since eCommerce systems require a network of integrated applications working together seamlessly, it only takes a few coding errors to bog the entire system down.  Unfortunately, those quality issues are often hidden deep within the source code—making them incredibly difficult to find without the assistance of an automated code analyzer.

But don’t just take our word for it.  When an international retailer’s website was taking 20-30 seconds to load and causing them to lose 18 percent of their orders, they reached out to us to lend a helping hand.  By leveraging our partnership with CAST Software, we performed a code analysis of their eCommerce platform, and in just a few short days had discovered what had been stumping them (and slowing their site) for years: over 1600 quality issues and 200 security violations, which were impacting their revenue by $100 million!

That’s more than enough to cause some holiday nightmares, wouldn’t you say?

So, if you’re worried that load testing isn’t doing enough for your company’s website, don’t hesitate to hit us up to learn more about our code analysis assessments, and how they can help ensure your customers stay happy—and your feet stay out of hot water.  After all, it might just be the difference between a stressful or stress-free Holiday Season!

Cheers,

Mike Hodge
Lighthouse Technologies, Inc.
Software Testing | Quality Assurance Consulting | Oracle EBS Consulting