Testing Healthcare Applications: How to Load Test Healthcare Applications

Healthcare Application Testing

Like healthcare in general, prevention truly is the best medicine when it comes to the health of your critical healthcare applications. The way to prevent serious issues with your applications is by testing. Testing prevents you from having situations where users and consumers are denied critical services by your applications because the applications simply cannot perform the way that they are supposed to perform.

This can have dire effects on employee productivity, quality of care, and patient safety.


You want to prevent this at all costs. Testing is the best prevention here. One important test of perform is a load test, which is when you take an application that you are about to go live with and simulate the stresses that it will be under when it is being used by many users simultaneously. A load test that is properly set up and executed can give you critical insights into how your application will perform when it goes live.

In order to avoid a situation where you are spending an enormous amount of time and money load testing and only getting mediocre results, you need to follow the following steps to set up and execute your load test. If you follow the steps, then you will minimize your costs, reduce the amount of time that you need to wait before you can launch your application, and get the most useful results possible.

Step 1: Select a Good Load Tester

Traditional load testers have a bad reputation because they are immensely complicated, expensive and slow. For this reason, many companies forgo load testing altogether. With your healthcare applications, however, this is not a good option.

The good news is that load testing does not have to be complicated, expensive and time-consuming. AppLoader is a protocol independent load tester that is simple to set up and execute. It test from the end-user’s point of view, which means it will give you the best results that you can possibly get from your load tests because it simulates what your users will ultimately experience.

If you select AppLoader, then you will be well on your way to setting up and executing an effective load test because AppLoader contains within it all of the elements of a successful load test. In fact, it even automates most of the process, which means that you are primarily responsible only for planning, overseeing and adjusting the load test.

Step 2: Determine What You Will be Testing

Before beginning your load test, you should take time to plan out exactly what you will be testing for. This step involves getting a good idea of the number of users that will be using your application and functions that they will require from the application. If this is a brand-new application, you will need to do more guesswork than you would if you are just simply upgrading an existing location.

It is also important to get a sense of what a successful load test will look like. At what level of performance will your application be deemed to be ready to go live?

Step 3: Set Up the Load Test

Once you know what you are looking for, it is time to set up the load test. If you have selected a load tester like AppLoader, then this is a very straightforward thing to do. AppLoader is protocol independent, which means it is capable of testing just about any application using any system. All you need to do is let AppLoader know which application you will be testing along with the levels of stress that you would like to test it under.

Step 4: Load Test Your Application on Normal and Higher-Than-Expected Loads

It is a good idea to test your application under both normal and higher than expected loads. You never know exactly how much use your application will receive when it is launched into the live environment. Therefore, testing at a load that is higher than what you expect it to be under is a sensible thing to do.

This and the previous steps will allow you to launch your application with confidence. You will have all the data in front of you that confirms whether or not your application is truly ready to go into a live environment. This will make both the users and the customers that benefit from their services happy.

 

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