I will have a few thousand customers going to be on my website purchasing all at once (about 4K in a few minutes). Last 3 times I had this we had issues with bugs or server. I believe we've handled the server issues, we use Rackspace and scaled up more servers last 2 times & didn't see any issues with servers. But we had a few bugs each time that caused major issues. I've done testing myself and had 3 others review the site and I've corrected those issues. But really the problem is that we don't discover these bugs until we are hit with this much traffic all at once. I've done load testing using a third party site but that doesn't really show us bugs as it's not real users utilizing the site & preforming functions they would normally do. We also don't have much of any money to throw at this. FYI, with our web app/site our customers send their customers to purchase goods from our site, which charges them a fee based off the number in line they are to come to the site. This "number in line" model is what causes most of the complexity and problem. But we can't change that as it's what our customer's want.
Performing quality assurance at every stage of development is what you are after. Ideally providing automation at every level coupled with some manual checking. The upfront costs of automation sometimes are daunting but will actually save you money in the long run.
Breaking code and breaking software is how you should thing about it. This puts the responsibility into every team member (designer, developer etc). The earlier the bugs are found the greater the ROI on setting up a world-class quality assurance plan.
Answered 8 years ago
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