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Performance Tester Diary - Episode 4

This is Chapter 4 of our journey of non-functional testing with Otto Perf.

Authors note

Previous chapters are available in this blog: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3.

In Chapter 3 Otto started to use build and deployment technologies in the form of GIT and Jenkins to support his performance testing. He learnt about the concepts of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment and spent some time integrating his performance tests into a push to production pipeline.

Otto was able to schedule his performance testing using Jenkins pipelines and he spent some time building a solution that analyse the test results for him so that he was able to spend more time building performance tests. This analysis solution also helped him determine if the performance tests had passed in the fully automated push to production pipelines. Otto also discovered that being integrated within the development teams provided more benefits that just being able to develop tests and subsequently execute them earlier in the development lifecycle. He discovered that several of the development practises such as code reviews and pair programming could equally apply to test development and this was something that Quality Engineering teams had not, in his experience, regularly done.

In this Chapter we will follow Otto as he starts to explore the benefits that technologies that instrument your application can provide to performance testing. Otto will also dive deeper into trend analysis of his performance test results and look to see what the performance results data is telling him.

Performance Tester Diary - Episode 3

This is Chapter 3 of our journey of non-functional testing with Otto Perf.

Authors note

Previous chapters are available in this blog: Chapter 1, Chapter 2.

Otto was extremely busy in Chapter 2 where he had built the strategy, he would adopt for the performance testing and had considered the load profiles he would use to generate load against the application. Otto also made a start in Chapter 2 on how he would aggregate and report on the tests he was executing and how he could compare tests results from previous tests execution cycles. He found out that his performance testing would influence how the application infrastructure would be sized in the production environment.

Otto also started writing tests and discovered that approaching these in a modular fashion can lead to significant time saving when the application changes, which is does when performance testing early in the delivery lifecycle. In this chapter we will follow Otto as he discovers how he can execute his tests using his GIT repository and Jenkins. And how he can ensure that performance testing is integrated into the Continuous Delivery / Continuous Integration (CI/CD) framework that the development teams are working in.

Otto will also discover what push to prod pipelines are and how performance testing can be included in this approach to production deployment.

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Performance Tester Diary - Episode 2

This is Chapter 2 of our journey of non-functional testing with Otto Perf. You can read Chapter 1 if you have missed it.

Authors note

The article is in the OctoPerf Blog pages

Otto had previously got to the point where he had defined a set of non-functional requirements and risk assessed these with the programme team. Otto had also had the opportunity to be involved in the design process which had allowed him to encourage the architects, and development leads to consider application performance as part of their architectural design principles. In this chapter we will follow Otto’s progress as he starts to consider how he is going to write his performance tests and how he will incrementally write tests in line with the development activity. Otto will also consider how he can make sense of the performance tests results he will gather and how he will ensure that the infrastructure is fit for purpose.

Performance Tester Diary - Episode 1

This is the first in a series of posts that are going to follow the fictional performance tester Otto Perf. Otto manages all aspects of performance testing for a fictional company OctoCar that specialise in selling used cars.

OctoCar are building a new system to manage the selling of their fleet of cars, and we are going to follow Otto on his journey as he ensures that the new technology platform performs in line with agreed non-functional requirements under peak volumes of load and concurrency.

We wanted to document the journey of performance testing through the delivery lifecycle of a new application from start to finish and look at how the non-functional testing process could be followed as the application is delivered.

Our blog posts normally focus on a singular aspect of the non-functional testing lifecycle and do not always consider the wider picture of non-functional testing, something that this series of posts will do.