1.4The Performance and Resilience Testing Lifecycle

Performance and resilience testing is not a phase -- it is a continuous practice integrated into the development lifecycle:

  Developer Commits Code
           |
           v
  +------------------+
  | Build-Time       |   <-- Bundle size check, dependency audit
  | Budget (< 1 min) |       Runs on every PR
  +--------+---------+
           |
           v
  +------------------+
  | Lighthouse CI    |   <-- Core Web Vitals, accessibility, SEO
  | (2-5 min)        |       Runs on every PR
  +--------+---------+
           |
           v
  +------------------+
  | API Performance  |   <-- k6 endpoint latency budgets
  | Budget (2-3 min) |       Runs on merge to main
  +--------+---------+
           |
           v
  +------------------+
  | Staging Load     |   <-- Full k6 load test with production traffic model
  | Test (15-30 min) |       Runs before production deployment
  +--------+---------+
           |
           v
  +------------------+
  | Chaos Testing    |   <-- Litmus experiments verify resilience
  | (10-30 min)      |       Runs after staging deployment
  +--------+---------+
           |
           v
  +------------------+
  | Production       |   <-- Canary + RUM validation
  | Validation       |       Continuous after deployment
  +------------------+

Each stage catches different categories of problems. Build-time checks catch JavaScript bloat. Lighthouse catches rendering performance regressions. API budgets catch backend latency. Load tests catch capacity issues. Chaos tests catch resilience gaps. Production validation catches everything else.

The rest of this book teaches you how to implement each stage.