Here's how you can ace discussing your load testing experience in a software testing interview.

Load Testing simulates a large number of users accessing a system or application simultaneously to measure its performance and scalability. It aims to determine how a system handles an expected volume of traffic or users. For instance, an online payment gateway can be load tested to handle a high volume day to day transactions. Stress Testing pushes a system beyond its limits to identify its breaking point and measure its recovery time. For instance, intentionally overloading a system to detect failure points, bottlenecks, and potential vulnerabilities. For instance, an e-commerce platform can be stress tested to simulate an extreme traffic on end of the year sales or a Black Friday.

Generally to perform any non-functional testing we need to depend on tools either to check system performance by creating virtual loads or to check transaction time which will be generally in milliseconds. In interview focusing on particular tool knowledge and advantages that you added by finding the issues in test stage to help stake holders with out crashing the application at peak loads or at times performing concurrent operations. Also focus on multiple scenarios that you validated part of load/stress/concurrent testing.

First of all, understand the concept of load testing, its requirements, the necessary tools, and test deliverables. Load testing is a type of performance testing that evaluates how a system behaves under a specific expected load. It helps to determine the system's capacity and identify any bottlenecks that might impact its performance

A load test focuses on a system's ability to support an increasing number of concurrent users or transactions. The goal is to identify bottlenecks and performance issues that arise when the system is subjected to increasing load. Load testing typically simulates real-world system usage by creating realistic usage scenarios. They can be run using automated load testing tools that generate artificial traffic to the system.

Master the tools for load testing such as JMeter, Gatling, K6, and LoadRunner. Familiarize with any of the tools to gain an end-to-end testing idea and awareness of real-world usage scenarios.

Determine the end-user scenarios and create test scripts based on them. For example, check the ability of an e-commerce application to handle concurrent user loads by examining the cart load.

Emphasize your ability to communicate complex technical findings to non-technical stakeholders. Discuss your experience working with developers, QA teams, and other stakeholders to implement performance improvements. Highlight the importance of thorough documentation of your load testing processes and findings. Showcase your ability to adapt to new tools and technologies as the industry evolves.