We have also discussed the concepts of Load Test Driven Development which involves the creation of performance testing in parallel with the code development and sits alongside Test Driven Development.
We are going to consider in this post how involving performance testing resources in the application design process can be a benefit.
We are going to look at how to test SOAP Services using JMeter and some of the issues that you can face when testing these services.
We are going to provide some basic principles of SOAP in this post and while some requests can be complex in their definition and structure testing them is relatively straightforward.
The best approach to performance testing SOAP Requests is to discuss what the structure of the message is with your development teams or 3rd parties should the service be hosted external to your organisation.
Fundamentally it is no different to any other HTTP Request in that you need:
The first item on the list is obviously the new virtual user creation process. A lot of people were confused by the older UI and used the menus to get back to the project level when what they really wanted was to get back to the last step. Of course the fact that you are now required to click on Back / Next to move to the another step of the process requires one more interaction but it's also a lot easier to understand what's going on since it results from your actions. We think it's the right way to go since the only drawback is adding a couple of clicks on a process that is only used a few times per project.
To make things easier for beginners, the contextual documentation will display as soon as you select any option. It's also a better use of horizontal space that would otherwise be lost:
The rise of the CI/CD methodologies and frameworks have shaped the daily work of application developers and testers.
It allowed for the creation of the DevOps model.
DevOps culture demanding "everything as code", modern infrastructure tooling has grown to drive the management and configuration of infrastructure components "as code" alike.
To sum up, JMeter load testing can efficiently be executed on automation servers but:
The JMX format is not VCS friendly, making it hard to work on as a team,
Using an external graphical application might be a barrier for programmers.
Application developers know that code and associated configuration files can easily be shared, versioned and reused.
It's about time we **take "testing as code" seriously and bridge the gaps between development and load testing activities and teams.
The aim of this blog post is to do an overview of available solutions to do "Jmeter as code" using an existing JMX File.
Our new UI has been available for everyone since a few weeks now. It is a major project for us that has taken several years to get to this stage. It's been a lot of effort but we're confident that it will be worth it when you see all the new possibilities.
That being said, we thought it would be helpful to ease you into it by going through some of the key features together. The goal is to talk about the major UI changes that impact most if not all the new screens. Then we'll cover the specifics of each individual steps (like design or runtime) in later blog posts.
The top menu has become a left-handed menu now.
We've always been trying to keep up with properly adding the new features in the menus like we did last year. But we thought it could be improved further. Typically, we noticed that new users struggled to notice what's inside the workspace menu so we decided to split it into another "Tools" submenu.
Workspace and projects remain visible at all times in order to navigate back to their level easily.
It can also be collapsed in order to save horizontal space once you are familiar with the layout and icons.
