• Founded 2004, Offices in Jena and Erfurt, Germany
• Subsidiary in Cambridge, MA, USA
• 50+ Employees
• Focused on Software Test and Quality Assurance
• Performance Testing, Test Automation, Functional Testing, QA, and Test Process Consulting
• Mostly Active in Ecommerce and Internet
• Own Open Source Tooling Test Tool XLT () - https://github.com/Xceptance/XLT

• Goal: Gain confidence and knowledge, learn to know and trust the system. Ensure it can fullfil the business requirements.
• Why? Get a comprehensive picture of the system's performance, stability, and scaling behavior.
• How? Use a load test tool to create an accurate simulation of its future usage and measure the system's behavior. This is mostly a black box view.
• Result: See the behavior of interactions with the system, see any changes over time as well as situations that might trigger certain types of errors.

• Engineering: Starts precisely planned, loses focus quickly, cannot sell results to higher levels without causing uncertainty or unwanted discussions
• Eng/QA: Don't talk the same language when talking about results
• Eng Management: Asks technical questions about the testing over and over again because it does not understand the results or doubt them
• Product Management: Too much data
• Sales: Give us a number, one number only please.
• Services: Was it our fault?
• Implementation Partners: Does it work and is there anything to do?
• Merchants: Will we succeed?

R,QuickView.1,1571927593069,112,false,1593,6096,200,https://host/842177173640.html?cgid=sales,text/html,0,0,111,0,111,111,,,,,0,,
R,QuickView.2,1571927593184,79,false,1639,592,200,https://../Wishlist?productID=842177173640,application/json,0,0,79,0,79,79,,,,,0,,
A,QuickView,1571927593064,199,false
R,AddToCart.1,1571927597981,263,false,1727,3889,200,https://host/Cart-AddProduct?format=ajax,text/html,0,0,260,1,260,261,,,,,0,,
A,AddToCart,1571927597981,264,false
T,TOrder,1571927533453,100982,false,,

• Direct Timeline: When in time (absolute timestamp)
• Indirect Timeline: When within a visit (relative view)
• Direct Context: Type of request (homepage, search...), Parameters, Method (GET, POST...)
• Indirect Context: First request, same request type but different parameters, repeated request but with different server state (cart size, login state)...
• Location: Datacenter, Region (EMEA, NA, APAC), Country, Machine (IP), Agent (load test process)
• Remember, black box testing aka we don't have a target context most of the time.

• Uncompressed Data: 48.72 GB
• Compressed Data: 4.10 GB
• Lines per Second: 17,569
• Datapoints per Second: 293,084

• A load test can be expensive
• The execution window might have passed
• The next run might not yield the same results
• The environment might have changed (software, hardware, data)
• Results are often the trigger for a more detailed analysis, getting the same results is mostly impossible
• Problems are often time and event based, hence you have to know the question but you got only the response
• Therefore, every report is produced offline and can be "reshaped" if needed
• Raw data is available to look for details beyond a regular report

• Realtime analysis or at least realtime queries
• Better charts with more details or less noise - Visualization!
• Identification of patterns and events without manual chart analysis
• Making things even faster or scale better
• Making static charts interactive without a backend