In this episode discover how to fuel up your performance testing efforts as we test talk with Andy Hawkes. Andy is the creator of a new performance test tools called Loadster. So listen up and discover how using Loadster can help you lower the barrier or entry for newbie performance test engineers and help find performance risk in your application before your customer does.

About Andy Hawkes

Andy is an Experienced full-stack web developer and consultant, specializing in rapid prototyping and concept development. Creator of Loadster, a commercial load testing tool to help find bottlenecks and validate the scalability of web apps and services. His specialties are Web architecture, front-end development, back-end development, rapid prototyping, performance & scalability

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk with Andy Hawkes

• I think there were a lot of like the older tools some of the problems with those at the time were number one cost so only the big enterprises could really afford some of those tools. And what ended up happening was there was like this ivory tower situation at least at the place where I was and I was actually like one of the guys sitting in the ivory tower and acting as sort of a gatekeeper to all these projects. You know it was kind of like the worst excesses of like the waterfall model.
• jMeter is a great tool and some of the other ones. Gatling is really good. There are a lot of good, very capable open source tools. What Loadster tries to do is make you the most productive performance tester you can be. So if you’re willing to trade a little bit of money for potentially a lot of time savings then it makes sense to go with Loadster and that’s the feedback we get from a lot of customers as well.
• We designed Loadster to be really easy to come up to speed interface. It’s a graphical interface that you can drop down to JavaScript code when you need to. Particularly if you need to do any validation or capturing of response you can put in a Javascript function but it’s entirely possible and easy in fact to get a script without really having to know or having to do any coding. So it’s it’s kind of a good fit for a lot of people who maybe they’re they’re just getting into automation testing or they don’t come from like a primarily a development background to create scripts and get going get up to speed.
• One of the challenges a lot of people have that that often just results in them not even getting started on with performance testing is feeling like you have to performance test, all the things, all the time in order to have a valuable outcome. I think what it’s really about is reducing the risk of a production failure. And even if you can run a day’s worth of tests and reduce the risk by 50 percent that’s a pretty valuable business outcome in a lot of cases.
• My definition of load testing is any time you test a system to see how it behaves under load. And typically with web apps and websites that means with lots of concurrent users or lots of concurrent requests.
• One piece of advice would be, it doesn’t have to be perfect to be valuable. If you can reduce the risk of a production failure by 50 percent totally go for it especially if it doesn’t take very much investment. It’s definitely one of those things where there’s like diminishing returns. The more thorough you want to get so you can get a decent amount of confidence for a pretty small investment of time and money and you can get more confidence from a little more investment and so on. It’s definitely worth doing even if you can only increase your level of confidence in the app by 50 percent 75 percent. That’s still a big business value in most cases. So I guess in a nutshell my advice would be to just do it.
• TestTalks Listeners Get FREE 500 units of  fuel – email Andy @LoadsterPerformance.com

Connect with Andy Hawkes & Loadster

• Website: https://loadster.app
• Twitter: @loadsterperf
• Twitter: @azhawkes

Rate and Review TestTalks

Thanks again for listening to the show. If it has helped you in any way, shape or form, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the page. Additionally, reviews for the podcast on iTunes are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them.

Powered By SauceLabs

Test Talks is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce Labs. Try it for free today!