• CTO's Role and Sanity Testing Importance: As a CTO, work closely with engineering teams to align performance testing strategies with business goals. Sanity testing, a simple step, often determines performance testing success. Many teams focus on large-scale tests but neglect validating test scripts and system functionality before full-load tests.
• Conversations With Clients: Had discussions with teams facing performance testing failures due to incorrect test configurations, missing parameters, or broken scripts. For example, a financial services company spent weeks on an elaborate test with erratic response times and random transaction failures. A quick sanity test before could have caught session persistence issue. A retail company preparing for Black Friday had load test checkout failures; a UI update broke automation scripts, and a simple sanity check could have saved time.
• Why Sanity Testing Matters: From a CTO's perspective, performance testing is about efficient work and resource use. Sanity testing acts as an early warning system, reducing debugging time, optimizing resource allocation, and improving confidence in test results.
• How to Approach Sanity Testing in Load Testing: Sanity testing is about quick validation. Run a light load first, check for functional breaks, and validate response consistency. These principles help prevent false alarms and streamline performance engineering.
• Making Sanity Testing an Essential Part of Workflow: Sanity tests should be lightweight and reliable, automated and integrated into CI/CD pipelines. Sanity testing has saved time for the author and team. For more, check the blog post on sanity testing in load testing.