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Load Testing Blog

Performance Testing in application Design

There are many articles on the huge benefits of performance testing integrated into the development process and the concept of shift-left performance testing.

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.

Soap Requests in JMeter

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:

  • URL of the service,
  • Payload,
  • Request Header (including any authorisation).

OctoPerf's new UI - Design changes

This article is the second in a series of overviews of our new UI. You can find the first one here.

This time we will dive into the changes we've made in the design phase. We've addressed many pain points from the old UI that we want to detail here:

This will make the design in OctoPerf even faster, so that you can focus more time on your tests and analyzing them.

Create virtual user

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:

Back

JMeter: test as code solutions

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.

From a load testing point of view, we already detailed how to Shift left with JMeter in this blog: Moving the JMeter testing to an earlier stage in the project lifecycle can be done by running load tests saved in a GIT repository from Jenkins. At OctoPerf we think that JMeter is one of the best tools to implement an Agile and Push to Production strategy. We explained how this approach can be useful how in a Load Test Driven Development process.

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.