“Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All” – an article about statistic and programme testing. You know, load testing and all that jazz that you know you’re supposed to do.

Recently I was tasked with doing a heap of load testing, and we had all sorts of problems – all related, really, to confounding. I didn’t (and don’t) feel I know enough to design a load test, and the tools we were using were, well, limited. It’s interesting to note that I came to the same conclusion – that the data throughput was the most important metric.

However, the reason all these things talk about the number of users isn’t because programmers want it – rather, management and customers want to know how many users will it support. Telling them that you got an average data throughput of whatever is a better measure, but it doesn’t really mean anything to them – whereas could support 25 concurrent users does.