From Load Testing to Reliability Engineering [Testμ 2026]

At Testμ Conf 2026, ING’s Stephan Mousset argued that performance testing should be treated as a continuous reliability-engineering feedback loop rather than a standalone activity, because test data alone cannot determine whether a change is safe for production. He recommends defining user-focused service level indicators and objectives around latency, traffic, errors, and saturation; selecting test types according to specific risks rather than habit; and modelling workloads from observed production behaviour. For sudden demand such as ticket sales, he favors spike and stress tests over routine load or endurance testing, while noting that long-duration tests may still be required for regulation. Mousset emphasized correlating test results with application and infrastructure observability, using automation to reduce manual analysis rather than replace engineering judgment, and validating test predictions against production outcomes. A disaster-recovery exercise at ING, which exposed inadequate high-load capacity after a data-centre failure, illustrated why resilience testing must reveal real operational weaknesses. His central conclusion is that production feedback should continuously refine objectives, workload models, capacity planning, and release decisions, with staged releases helping teams learn before broader deployment.

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