How Prepared are you for Black Friday?

The hustle-bustle of Black Friday has started as Nov 28, 2014 is just ten days to go. Awaiting this day are two types of people who are fully immersed in the holiday shopping season: department store music selectors and web application testers.

True, the most active shopping days of the year will be here soon. So apart from the excitement that’s building up, make sure your website is ready for the deluge of online shoppers who have been waiting for long to rattle on your digital door.

I am sure we all know what happened in 2013, Motorola announced that it would offer cheap phones for a short time, and so many people wanted in on that deal that the website crashed and a ton of orders were left unfulfilled. The company’s CEO personally apologized for the incident, and the company held a ‘do-over’ on the deal.

This is something that happens every year so we know the consequences of a poorly tested website. Here, let us help you follow a simple checklist that will help you to prepare for ‘Black Friday’.

Bolt Your Environment

Too many and too often changes give way to errors. By now you should have your production environment locked down with a very clear and controlled process for managing changes. Keep a backup of your site available – hopefully it is all contained with source code control anyway – and monitor your site for unauthorized modifications. Any changes that do need to be made should be tested thoroughly, reviewed by peers, and sent through a committee before being released into the production environment. Then they should be tested again.

Initiate Regular Load Testing

With your environment locked down, you should have high confidence that your site functions as expected – that is, the code is working. So now you want to focus on scale by performing series of load tests in both your QA environment and your production environment. Since you are aware of the loopholes that are likely to occur on Black Friday you’ll want to try lots of different scenarios, focusing on suspected bottlenecks in the system. It’s a good idea to leverage a cloud testing platform to provide some geographical realism to your scenario as well, that way you are accurately simulating the many locations that will be accessing your site.

Communication plays a key role

Be in continuous touch with your monitoring team and boost the communication. It’s not too much to ask them for a daily report, it does wonders. Collaborate with your counterparts on the monitoring team to identify key metrics across both QA and Production and disseminate them through a daily preparedness email. These open channels will help you put in place more complicated forums for working together, such as a war room to address issues in real-time, should they happen.

Be attentive to the promotions around

Talk to your marketing team about the promotions they are going to run. This helps you to know in advance what are they promoting and you could bulk up on your infrastructure, get your operational teams in place, and do all the essentials to prepare for all the likely scenarios. Keep a specific calendar of all these promotions, and test each one in advance of Black Friday. You’ll want to know the nitty gritties of what you are dealing with.

Create a Social Media Monitor

Users look to lash out their complains and disappointments on Twitter or Facebook. Set up automated monitors and alerts to scour the comment stream and look for customers who are facing issues. It’s amazing, the impact an attentive customer service rep can make to a user’s experience. But a conflict that is more important is these signals could be an early warning sign indicating a problem is happening somewhere.

Create a Contingency Plan

Surely there can be a chance that things go bad. But that should not bother you to an extent of shutting down over a weekend when consumers spend endlessly. Thus, have a backup plan. For this, you have to have a backup plan for your backup plan. Make sure you have a failover site set up and make sure it’s been thoroughly tested. Have a trained team that is ready to jump into issues and handle any problems that arise. Make sure your contingency plans are well-documented, circulated, and precise.

Finally & Most Importantly – Test Again

True, you will never feel completely ready. When everything else is sorted, keep testing. Go through a few more scenarios. Push the limits a little farther. Approach the system from a slightly different angle. The more you push your website, the more self-assured you’ll be.

All the Best!