In this blog post we are going to look at using JMeter to support business testing in production.
This is a slightly different topic to the one discussed in this post on testing in production.
The one in the link above is around running your performance testing in production for reasons that are discussed in that post.
This post is going to focus on how you can leverage your performance testing tools to support this activity, as discussed above we will focus on JMeter in some of the examples.
But any load testing tool, or even functional testing tool, can provide the same benefits.
In this post we are going to look at the importance of volume testing. We are going to consider how this type of non-functional test can have a significant impact on your size and scale your production environment based on evidence this test provides.
We are going to look at some real-world examples of how getting your volume testing correct will ensure that your environments are not oversized or undersized. Both these scenarios have a cost which is both financial and potentially reputational.
Volume testing belongs to the group of non-functional tests, which are a group of tests often misunderstood and/or used interchangeably. Volume testing refers to testing a software application with a certain amount of data to assert the system performance with a certain amount of data in the database. Volume testing is regarded by some as a type of capacity testing, and is often deemed necessary as other types of tests normally don't use large amounts of data, but rather typically use small amounts of data.
We use this test to understand the impact of large data volumes on your application under test.
Larger data volumes in the database can:
Increase the query time of your SQL statement which impact response times,
Impact the amount of CPU or memory your database uses and therefore you can use this test to size this component,
Impact the size of responses to end user and API requests, with search requests being an example, this impacts application CPU and Memory.
A volume test looks to not only understand performance of the SQL with an indicative sized database. But also looks to understand how much CPU and Memory is required across you full stack to support peak volumes of load and concurrency.
The results you gather from this type of non-functional testing is important in determining how you application needs to be sized in production to support future data volumes.
In this blog post we are going to look at how we can use our performance tests to act as Sanity Test. We have touched upon the subject in one of our blog posts on the hidden benefits or performance testing.
This post will however look to provide more detail on the subject and provide guidance on how you can accomplish this.
We are not suggesting that you write a set of JMeter tests to act as sanity tests for our application under test as that would not be that beneficial. There are much better ways to write sanity tests for applications in the form of Unit Tests in code or by using a functional testing tool such as Playwright.
What we are going to investigate is how you could use already existing JMeter tests to also support Sanity testing. If you have a set of performance tests or are in the process of creating a set of performance tests for a particular project or programme, then to build them in such a way that they can double as Sanity tests would be beneficial.
We will look at how when building a test, you could also add some additional logic to give your performance tests the capability of supporting an application Sanity test. If you have a set of tests already that you have built, then by following this post will show you how these existing assets can be updated to support Sanity testing.
In this post we are going to look at performance test coverage.
What functionality to performance test can range from very little to most of the application under test and both are valid under the right circumstances.
We have talked about what to performance test in other posts available in the OctoPerf Blog but as part of a wider post about performance testing rather than as the subject of the post. This is an important topic and deserves a post devoted to it.
We are going to discuss the performance coverage topic through a series of questions which we will explore in detail. These questions are:
In this blog post we are going to look at how we take a postman request or collection and translate these into JMeter tests. When web services are being build it is common for Postman to be used to test the endpoints. This is done by:
Development teams
Wider Quality Assurance community
Business users
Product owners
the list goes on.
What naturally happens during programmes where web services are part of the design is that postman requests and collections are built and grow to support all manner of requirements. Using these collections to quickly build your performance tests can save you a significant amount of time and effort when it comes to understanding the web service you are testing along with the payload that the web service expects.
You will find that in some cases you can inherit a fully functioning set of web service requests that support all your requirements from a performance testing perspective.