| Load Testing has been both a blessing and bane in my career. Most managers only want to see how traffic will perform in what-if scenarios (can we handle Black Friday, what will happen if our traffic goes up 10x during a special event, etc). For these, JMeter and whatever service you're using for analytics/metrics work perfectly fine (New Relic, is the current favorite). Then we can compare average latency, Error Rates, etc. with what we get during JMeter. The issue is that most managers or other PHB want more than just a one off for load testing. And this article greatly covers that. A lot of time people want a Swiss Army Knife of tools for "automation", where load testing falls under that category for them. This magical tool should be able to: * Test your API calls from a functional, integration, and a performance (not load testing; just making sure we're under specific latency) * Test your Web-sites from the same testing perspectives, as well as being modular (ie: Selenium's POM) * Integrate with CI so specific tests, test suites/flows can be tested for every new build, and we can run specific workflows by clicking a button * Be used during load testing so we can measure latency and run tests while recreating customer experience from the Web side of things For each of these steps, there is at least one good tool or library to handle things. However, I've found it difficult to find something that handles all of these well and where (most importantly) the other devs are willing to pick it up. Selenium/Web Driver handles the UI tests. Postman and a handful of others can perform the API tests. JMeter is the de facto for load testing at every place I've been to. And you can write any of these into your CI. Is there something that can do all of this well, and has a low enough overhead where devs on your team are willing enough to actually use it as more than just a toy or experiment? |