Don’t forget to do network simulation in all your testing efforts

I’ve noticed that most of my clients have finally been convinced that unit testing and regular automated acceptance testing is a “good thing.” However, I’ve noticed that load/stress testing, while moving up in importance, still has a long way to go. Even those doing load testing, though, forget to do proper network simulation to make sure that their tests will valid with “real world” network traffic.

So, the simple advice is to be sure to use network traffic generators and network load simulators when testing your software. A good option is something like Simena. It’s not expensive and works well.