Extreme Programming (XP) requires that a development team release code for testing iteratively throughout development, this increases the need for testing. The question becomes can the testing team keep up with the pace code releases? One solution is to consider using automated testing tools instead of manual testing.
Linda Hayes article “The 'Extreme Programming' Testing Trap,” in the January edition of Datamation put this best.
Let's say that you are delivering an application in 10 iterations of two weeks each. In the first iteration, you have the same amount of code to write as you have to test, so all is well. The problem is that for the second iteration, and every iteration thereafter, testing has to cover all of the cumulative functionality as well as what has been added, so that by the tenth iteration there is at least 10X the amount of testing to be done. In reality there is probably 100X because of the interactions among functions, but no matter how you slice it you can't turn around the testing as fast as you can turn around the code.
Linda Hayes goes onto talk about regression testing, but the same principles apply for load testing, as your code changes you will want to monitor possible bottlenecks in your web application environment.
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