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Load-Testing

Hidden Benefits of Performance Testing

If you are a performance testing specialist or a QA Manager or Programme Manager or anyone involved in the production of quality software then you understand why performance testing is required and its benefits in ensuring your products meet your Quality Criteria for release into production.

The costs of delivering performance testing are easily worth the investment as software that performs not only ensures you and your company have a reputation for delivering well performing software but business users will, in my opinion, overlook and embrace small functional workarounds if the software performs well.

As an investment it is worth the cost of building robust and reusable performance tests for the purposes of performance regression testing and that in itself will justify the cost of keeping them current and executable against the latest versions of code which is a maintenance activity that needs to continue as your product changes and evolves.

Some organisations leave their performance tests purely for the purpose of performance testing but there are other uses for these performance tests and by using them for these additional uses you can save time and money on the building and maintaining alternative tests.

We are going to look at some of the additional uses of performance tests in this post that will further justify the building of a complex performance testing suite.

Gatling: Simulation Scripts Parameterization

This blog post is a tutorial for writing Gatling scripts to load test web applications. It follows our first getting started with Gatling simulation scripts article.

The application under test is a fake e-commerce. We are going to create a Virtual User that browses articles in this shop. To create a dynamic load test we will cover several topics:

Gatling: Getting Started With Simulation Scripts

Gatling is a load testing tool for measuring the performance of web applications. As such, it supports the following protocols:

  • HTTP,
  • WebSockets,
  • Server-sent events.

Other protocols are also supported either by Gatling itself (like JMS) or by community plugins.

Gatling load testing scenarios are defined in code, more specifically using a specific DSL. This guide focuses on the basics of writing a simulation to test an HTTP application: OctoPerf's sample PetStore.

A Guide to Non-Functional Requirements

What are they?

Well, non-functional requirements are requirements that define the operation of the system under test rather than the behaviour of the system under test, or the functional requirements as these are known.

The categories under which non-functional requirements are grouped are numerous with a degree of overlap, we are going to attempt to demystify some of these whilst attempting to articulate how they can be tested and some of the common pitfalls.

The world of non-functional testing can be murky and ambiguous in contrast to its functional counterpart where expected functionality and behaviour is easier to define.

Hopefully this blog post will give some insight in to how non-functional requirements can be tackled and made testable.

JMeter vs SoapUI

There are many functional and load testing tools available on the market. That's great!

The most renewed open-source tools are certainly JMeter and SoapUI.

But, I'm sure you agree to say that it's difficult to know which one best suits your needs:

  • What features has JMeter?
  • What are the pros of using SoapUI?
  • Which tool has best community? User experience? Script maintainability?
  • Should I use JMeter or SoapUI? Or maybe both?

Gain significant insight on JMeter and SoapUI differences by reading this blog post that compares them on many different fields:

Ready for some action? Let's go!