Preparing for the Madness: Load Testing the College Bracket Challenge

For the past two seasons, the Windows Live development team has run the Live.com College Bracket Challenge, which hosts brackets for scores of customers during the "March Madness" NCAA basketball tournament. March Madness is the busiest time of the year for most sports Web sites. So, how do you build your Web application and test it for scalability to potentially millions of customers? Ed Glas guides you through the process their team uses to model users, establish performance goals for their application, define test data, and construct realistic operational scenarios. Learn how the tests were conducted, the specific database performance and locking problems encountered, and how these problems were isolated and fixed. Finally, Ed demonstrates the custom reporting solution the team developed to report results to stakeholders.

• How to establish performance goals and requirements
• Ways to accurately model user behavior and load
• Performance testing data analysis and reporting