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OctoPerf's new UI - Overview changes

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.

Of course the first thing that comes to mind is the navigation through OctoPerf. And we've made a lot of changes in this area.

Left-handed menu

Left hand menu

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.

Adeo - Case study

Adeo is the European leader in the home improvement and DIY market, and number 3 worldwide. Its companies : Leroy Merlin, Bricoman, Weldom, Zôdio… Gather 150 000 leaders and more than 1000 sales points over 20 countries.

Teams all over the world enable ADEO companies be useful to inhabitants while making home a positive place to live.

Thomas Pitteman
Thomas Pitteman Very fond of everything related to computers, he worked in the transport industry before merging work with passion by joining Adeo in 2018. He is now head of load testing, responsible for harmonizing testing methodologies and the onboarding process. He was also an important part of the benchmarking process which resulted in the selection of Octoperf as the new load testing tool.

Marc Lavieville
Marc Lavieville is lead Quality Manager at Adeo. Always attracted to innovations and new challenges, he worked in many different fields before ending up creating the team responsible for quality management at Leroy Merlin. Since that project was a success, and with the emergence of platform mode operation, he was asked to contribute that team to the whole Adeo group.

While load testing was gaining traction in the company, limitations from the usual tool, were found and prevented an easy growth:

  • 5 parallel runs limitation, that could only be upgraded through a very expensive license modification,
  • Floating licensing policy which only allowed 5000 concurrent Vus for the entire company,
  • Load tests duration capped at 8 hours,
  • Insufficient resources on the load generators (2CPU / 8Gb Ram),
  • The lack of a strong relationship with the tool's support team.

All those limitations pushed ADEO to begin the process of acquiring a new tool.

Angular: @ViewChild() and @ContentChildren() decorators

With the release of OctoPerf's new UI we wanted to create a component that would allow our users to easily edit HTTP request actions.

The new UI being heavily inspired by IDEs such as Eclipse or Visual Studio we decided to create a component that behaves likes the project settings panel of IntelliJ:

IntelliJ Settings

This panel displays a tree on its left part with a search input on top. The content of the left part changes depending on the current selection.

While our simplified version will only display a list on the left panel, the idea is to create a composite component :

A visual component made of disparate or separate parts or elements, here a parent settings component and children settings panel components.

BivwAk! - Case study

BivwAk! is the transformation hub for BNP Paribas. Its goal is to bring new services and skillsets at the crossroad of all BNP Paribas entities. It's in this context that Dino learned about OctoPerf.

Dino Dona
Dino Dona is the QA lead at BivwAk! He handles all the testing-related activities.
Dino is very passionate about testing because it's a constantly evolving space.
With new methodologies and tools emerging all the time.

We met Dino at the french testing event JFTL. After a short discussion it was clear that OctoPerf would be a very good fit at BivwAk!

  • in JMeter
  • 8 min read

Scalability Testing

We are going to look at scalability testing in this Blog Post. On paper scalability testing is simple because all you are doing is increasing the load, but there are some common pitfalls that can be easily avoided. So you need to really understand what you are trying to achieve before you start.

Basic Principles

Let’s start with the basic principles: A scalability test is the process of systematically increasing load on your application under test until

  • You reach your goal in terms of desired load,
  • The system starts to become unresponsive.

If you want to get a clear picture of whether your application does scale then it is important to run your scalability test on an environment that is consistent with production, or how you expect production to be.

Clearly one of the objectives of a scalability test is to size the environment so you must also have the flexibility to increase the resources in the environment in which you are running this test.