Poor software quality carries with it tremendous costs to an organization. In today's mission critical enterprise, applications are often very complex, involving multiple tiers, different technologies and even different legacy application components. Additionally, applications have to be developed in less time and with fewer resources in order to keep the costs down. All of this makes them prone to debilitating performance, scalability and reliability problems. As quality requirements like high performance and uptime have not been lowered but increased in order to stay competitive, missing an application’s quality requirements can quickly jeopardize a company's business goals. This session introduces load testing, an important component in optimizing software quality. Proper load testing can help to mitigate the costs of poor quality. This paper will explore the importance of load testing, the time in the software development process at which to load test, and how optimal performance can be achieved by proper load testing.