High Risk Test Cases

Taken from: http://www.webperformance.com/load-testing/blog/2012/01/identify-and-test-high-risk-operations/

After testing and optimizing those, the next step is to identify and test the rarely-used but high-risk operations. These are operations that may have an impact on performance that is not proportional to their frequency. Even though these are not as common, they can have large impacts due to their system-wide nature and can cause sporadic performance drops during production hours that defy explanation.
Examples include:

• Complex searches
• Updates that touch many joined tables at once
• Mass changes to data that affect many rows
• Large or complex reports
• Administrative functions, such as data migrations, data cleanup or consolidation, cache clearing, etc
• Backups