With a record revenue of R$ 9.38 billion in just 24 hours and 14.4 million orders registered, Black Friday 2024 has established itself as the main event of Brazilian e-commerce, according to data from the Hour by Hour panel. In addition to the significant increase in sales volume, the date brought considerable technical challenges: 55% of retailers reported slowness or instability in their systems, and 40% of these problems were attributed to failures in critical APIs, according to the FGV e-Commerce Yearbook.
In light of this high operational complexity scenario, practices such as Continuous Testing and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) have gained ground as essential tools to ensure availability, security, and performance. These approaches allow anticipating failures before they reach production, automating validations on a large scale, and maintaining resilience even in situations of extreme peaks.
A Vericode, specialized in software quality, has been directly involved in this process. In 2024, the company led the preparation of Grupo Casas Bahia’s infrastructure for Black Friday, simulating 20 million simultaneous users with the K6 tool and real-time monitoring via Grafana. The operation faced peaks of up to 15 million requests per minute, maintaining stability and performance throughout the shopping journey.
For this year’s Black Friday, the company’s expectation is that the application of artificial intelligence in automated testing and observability gains even more prominence. AI-based solutions promise to predict bottlenecks more accurately, adjust flows in real time, and expand testing coverage with less human effort, raising the standard of quality and efficiency of digital operations.
Joab Júnior, partner at Vericode and specialist in software testing and reliability engineering, emphasizes the importance of advanced practices to ensure stability during high demand moments: “Supporting millions of simultaneous requests is only possible with advance preparation, continuous automation, and established SRE practices. This reduces the risk of critical failures, ensures the integrity of the digital experience, and preserves revenue,” he explains.
In addition to load testing and monitoring, Vericode also invests in solutions such as dott.ai, a test automation platform with a low-codeapproach. The tool accelerates deliveries without compromising technical governance, contributing to system stability even during critical periods like Black Friday or launches with high traffic volumes.
According to research by Neotrust Confi, large retailers’ search endpoints reached up to 3 million requests per minute at the peak of 2024. The adoption of automated pipelines, continuous regression testing, and active observability has become the standard among companies seeking competitiveness and operational continuity during the most demanding moments of the commercial calendar.
For Joab Júnior, this scenario requires a change in mindset among technology teams: “The volume of traffic is increasingly unpredictable, and the only way to respond to that efficiently is by integrating quality from the beginning of the development cycle. It is not just about testing more, but about testing better, with intelligence, automation, and a focus on reliability.”
