Continuous Performance Testing with BlazeMeter

When it comes to performance testing, sometimes the best thing you can do is Just Do It. With open-source performance testing options, it’s never been easier to get started. And the best place to start is in CI. In this episode, Michael Sage from BlazeMeter shares which tools and techniques you should use to get started with your Continuous Performance testing efforts. You’ll discover how to get it done.

About Michael

Michael Sage has a 15-year career of enterprise software experience and customer success with specialities in many varieties of automated software testing and monitoring. Prior to BlazeMeter, Michael (better known as “Sage”) was a solutions architect and sales engineer in software delivery and performance management and has worked with industry-leading companies like Mercury Interactive, Hewlett-Packard and New Relic, helping teams implement integrated solutions that enhance the performance and experience of their customers.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• A developer writes some code, we discover some performance bottlenecks related to that commit or that build and fix them quickly. That’s basically where I think the cutting edge right now on performance testing is just getting it done earlier in the delivery work flow.1
• I think that if it makes sense a developer could start doing performance testing on his or her features really right from their desktop. We have the open source tools now where you don’t really need to invest a lot of up front effort in getting a performance testing script written and ready. You can actually do that pretty quickly. In fact, Blaze Meter has some technology. We sponsor an open source project called Taurus which allows developers to write their test in Yamel. They can actually describe a full blown script in about ten lines of text. A big, big leap forward from the old days of having to bring up a big, heavy vendor specific recording, scripting tool. 
• The place I see Docker being most meaningful to testing is in providing those kind of environments where we can spin up a test lab super easily, right?With Docker it gives us this tremendous flexibility in creating test environments so we can spin up and throw away. We don’t have to put any effort into ordering any hardware or managing any lab and paying people who just do that or just manage our QA lab. We can literally just spin up a lab that’s everything we need and then when the test is done we can dispose of it. That kind of flexibility is new.
• A person who is using BlazeMeter, as soon as they start the test will start to get immediate feedback. The KPI’s will come in. Those are the high level stats like number of concurrent users, the request per second, the hits per second that the servers are handling. Also response time of course. The over all response time and then also some percentiles. Ninety of percentiles response time. Just to give the testers or the developers the sense of those big important marquee metrics. Then what we provide is what we call a time line graph which shows each individual transaction in the script. 4
• The BlazeMeter chrome recorder is such a simple, simple way to get a performance script up and running. It’s a simple chrome extension. You launch it and capture your interactions with the browser. It immediately exports it jMeter script and it can also export JSON and a Taurus script. It does all this great little work. It’s a brainless way to get started. You can probably take that script and do much more sophisticated stuff with it. The jMeter’s recording is less than optimal so I like the chrome recorder a lot.
• I think the importance of performance is increasing intensely. The way we need to handle that is to just do it more often. Figure out the discipline. You’ll figure out jMeter or some other tool. You’ll learn about it but just start doing it. Engage with your developers. Engage the community of practice around your stack. Get performance testing done. Than we’ll start to work on all those details. 

Resources

• Taurus – Taurus, an open source test automation tool that extends and abstracts JMeter, and helps to overcome various challenges. Taurus provides a simple way to create, run and analyze performance tests.
• jMeter CookBook – 70 insightful and practical recipes to help you successfully use Apache JMeter

Connect with Michael

• Twitter: @mondosage
• Company:BlazeMeter

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