Regression and Load / Performance Testing

Former Member
Former Member $organization

Hey Friends,

One of my take-aways from the conference this year was a laundry list of software people are using to get the job done!  I thought i'd share, and see if the masses had anything to add:

Load Testing:

loadUI
Web Performance
Gomez 360 (compuware)

Scripted Regression Testing

DynaTrace (compuware)
Selenium IDE
usertesting.com

Performance Testing:

http://www.red-gate.com

Anyone have anything they'd like to add?

  • Former Member
    Former Member $organization

    Hi James,

    I've been focusing on both those things lately. I'm mostly intending to list the components here. I highly recommend shopping around for the software that works best for you.  There are competitor / equivalents for all of these and commerical / open source versions for all the different stacks like PHP, Rails, Java, so on.  

    Integration Testing

    * Like you mentioned, selenium has been great but expect a little time to learn it; 

    * More specifically check out the WebDriver (the latest implementation). It's easy to use and amazing

    * Also read up on the Page Object Pattern; this made my tests less brittle and easier to read/write. the firefox plugin / autogenerated code was good for learning, but I highly recommend using page objects instead for your final tests.

    Functional & Unit Testing

    * NUnit is great for functional / unit testing; and to automate running your Selenium (integration) tests

    * Mixes well with the Page Object Pattern & selenium web driver

    * Good for reporting back the results as well.

    Running Tests

    * I highly recommend automating the execution of your tests with NAnt or equavilient

    * Resharper if your in visual studio.net can run tests right from the IDE

    Simulating Load

    * BrowserMob costs money, is difficult at first to setup, but can launch actual browsers,  is scripted with selenium web driver and (if scripted correctly) simulates very REAL user load for figuring out capacity.

    Monitoring

    * Nlog or an open-source alternative is way better than roll-your-own logging.  Anything with logging levels that forces you to think about how you log, is priceless for testing.

    * Splunk if you also have IT monitoring needs; or an alternative like it... can come in very handy for consuming logs and analyzing load / performance.

     

    Quick mention that having gone through this and become an advocate for it.. I'll say that people should expect this stuff to take some time.  You have to build the capacity to use the technology and then you get the benefits.  It's an investment in infrastructure, stability, performance and productivity that gets done / pays back over time.  Well worth it though.

  • Former Member
    Former Member $organization in reply to Former Member

    Great stuff, Don!  Thanks for sharing.