Introduction to Automated Performance Testing
Performance Automation Testing continues to evolve to meet modern enterprise's growing demands. It's no secret that the industry has upgraded to a world influenced by automation from its predominantly manual roots (rooms full of QA personnel administering tests). Change has also occurred in the types of applications and systems under test.
Performance Monitoring is a tool that enables end users, administrators and organizations to gauge and evaluate the performance of a given system. Click to explore about, Performance Monitoring Tools and Management
Why Automated Testing is important?
Following are essential reasons for automating Performance Automation Testing - During design and implementation, many big and small decisions are made that may affect application performance - for good and bad. But since performance can be ruined many times throughout a project, excellent application performance cannot be added as an extra activity at the end of a project. If you have load tests carried out throughout your project development, you can proactively trace how performance is affected.
Without automation, the process of collecting measurement data and validating manually is complicated, which reduces productivity and increases turnaround times. Through automation, none of the steps done manually will be missed, and the time lost due to tester fatigue will be minimal.
Quality software is reasonably bug or defects free, delivered on time and within budget, meets requirements, expectations, and maintainable. Click to explore about, Software Quality Management
How to choose the right Automated Performance Testing?
Choosing the right Performance Automation Testing tool will help you to empower your project and make the Automation Framework function for you. Performance Testing tools fall across various categories, but it is crucial to have a know-how about the common types of testing tools. Test execution, planning, data comparison, bug capture, software performance, and some various software development needs are some essential factors to consider when choosing a test automation framework.
While a combination of Performance testing tools can collectively help you to find the performance issues, they can even run individually to detect the problems with the particular module/process. On similar lines, knowing what Automation Framework / Tool is going to do for you is crucial -
- The tool is expected to check for bugs, defects, typos, or format errors in the source code.
- It will help you identify the functionalities failures at each stage.
- It will also check interconnected software to identify the integration issues within an Embedded Software.
- With Database Testing tools, you can look over the issues within the interlinked database of a program.
- With Bug Tracking tools, it helps to track functionalities and identifies issues even while the software is running.
Another critical aspect that an automation framework brings for you is the Upgradation and Reusability of the code. This is the most significant rationale behind the implementation of the Test Automation Framework for Performance Testing so far. With a new test and a new bug discovery, the testing software directory is upgraded and made available for the other projects as well. It can be an expensive process, but experienced testers claim that in the future it is an investment for better ROI.
You can not miss out on the User Environment Simulation aspect in the context of Test Automation. Test Automation impacts the testing procedure by emulating a typical user environment. For example, Graphical User Interface testing is one of the most tedious processes, as the tester is expected to deploy the same procedures and simulate user-driven factors to check for functionality issues. Test Automation eases this out with the required testing framework.
A process to check the system accepts the requirements of a user or not. It's performed at a time when the system used by actual users. Click to explore about, User Acceptance Testing
How to automate the Performance Tests in Jenkins?
JMeter is one of the most popular and powerful open-source load testing tools. The JMeter script, however, can be challenging to manage. A simple request can turn into 100+ unreadable lines, and changes can only be made through JMeter. A more natural solution is Taurus, a YAML-based open-source test automation tool that simplifies Continuous Integration (CI) processes. Taurus scripts are easy to create, understand, and change.How to Create a Test in Taurus
Let's have a look at this example—but before you do, take a minute to install Taurus.
1 modules:
2 blazemeter:
3 test: Taurus Demo
4scenarios:
5 simple:
6 requests:
7 - label: HomePage
8 url: https://xenonstack.com/
9 - label: ContactUs Page
10 url: https://xenonstack.com/contact-us
11execution:
12 scenario: simple
13 hold-for: 5m
14 concurrency: 250
15 ramp-up: 120s
16services:
17- module: passfail
18 criteria:
19 - avg-rt of HomePage>750ms for 10s, continue as failed
Making Changes in the Load Test Script
Change the value on Taurus. We changed the ramp-up to 90 seconds in this case.
1modules:
2 blazemeter:
3 test: Taurus Demo
4scenarios:
5 simple:
6 requests:
7 - label: HomePage
8 url: https://xenonstack.com/
9 - label: ContactUs Page
10 url: https://xenonstack.com/contact-us
11execution:
12 scenario: simple
13 hold-for: 5m
14 concurrency: 250
15 ramp-up: 90s
16services:
17- module: passfail
18 criteria:
19 - avg-rt of HomePage>750ms for 10s, continue as failed
Viewing Load Test Reports on BlazeMeter
The data from Taurus tool is automatically fed into the BlazeMeter. Reports from BlazeMeter show multiple KPIs and correlations. Type –report to open BlazeMeter. BlazeMeter and Taurus enable automation of quality. Not only the load tests automated, but users can receive real-time feedback and analyze bottlenecks and problems, allowing them to make the necessary corrections in advance. We recommend adding functional tests to Jenkins as well as using tools like Sauce Labs to test browsers and operating systems.What is the Automated Performance Testing strategy?
If the duration of the user scenario is short (less than the 30s, say if you are testing a single endpoint of the API or a microservice), we recommend that you run the tests on each commit, as the test will not have to run long enough to collect enough samples to extract meaningful value from the results. If the duration of the user scenario is longer (say end-to-end tests with more complex flows), we recommend on the order of once a day, or whatever makes sense given how often you deploy to your pre-production environment where load tests are run.
Conclusion
Developers can get immediate feedback since they are not heavily dependent on the performance tester. Test run comparisons that are automated for making a high-level inference, and have side by side display of details help to review and assess the difference in performance between different versions of the Application. To know more about Test Automation we recommend taking the following steps -
- Get an Insight About Shift Left Testing
- Learn More About Automated Testing in DevOps
