Black Friday is just around the corner, and, like every year, it promises to be a tsunami of online traffic. Thousands of users searching for offers, payment systems working at full speed and websites that, if they are not ready, can end up collapsing at the most critical moment. Can you imagine losing sales and reputation because of a server crash? Better not.

The key is to anticipate. Last minute performance testing is not enough. And this can be achieved with tools without licensing costs, vision of specialised profiles and, of course, AI as an ally. 

The winning approach today is Agile: QA and Development work hand in hand from the start of each sprint to ensure code quality from the beginning, avoiding the costs of detecting and correcting bottlenecks once everything has been built (shift-left). A complete software engineering.

Why? Because correcting mistakes costs much more in the end. 

QA Ops: quality integrated in the lifecycle

How does this translate into practice? Integrating load testing into the CI/CD pipeline. Each time a merge is performed on the main branch, a test environment is deployed, tests are run, and the results are analysed. If something goes wrong, the pipeline stops and does not go into production. Thus, QA stops being 'the last stop' and becomes the cornerstone of the application lifecycle.

Today's tools allow clear thresholds to be defined: response times, error rates, etc. If these are exceeded, the deployment is aborted. 

The objective? Letting everything go green before the new version reaches users.

Is this expensive? Not at all

Nowadays there are open-source solutions such as k6, JMeter or Gatling capable of simulating tens of thousands of requests per minute without consuming too many resources. They run in containerised environments in the cloud and generate interactive HTML reports that you can share with your team. Moreover, if you want to monitor metrics in real time, the TIG stack (Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana) is more than enough.

What about traceability? Forget about spreadsheets. Free tools like Kiwi allow you to manage runs and results automatically, integrating with your pipeline to display the classic 'green/red' as soon as the test is finished.

AI: your ally, but with human oversight

Artificial intelligence is here to stay and can help you throughout the testing cycle: from identifying use cases and generating scripts to analysing results and writing reports. But beware: AI needs clear instructions and expert review. A bad prompt can lead to major errors.

At Izertis we have specialists who have been preparing systems for Black Friday for years. We set up realistic scenarios, monitor, optimise code and tune servers. And yes, we use AI to gain agility, but without losing quality, confidentiality or the human vision that makes the difference.

In short, Black Friday is not just about discounts. It is a litmus test for your technology infrastructure. If you want your website to withstand the downpour and convert every click into a sale, you need to start early. Anticipation, automation and experience: that is the recipe.