We live in a world that expects immediacy. For a society that gets news updates from Twitter in 140-character increments as it happens while we microwave a complete meal in less than five minutes, anything that takes months—or even weeks or days—seems like an eternity.
When it comes to continuous performance testing, organizations and developers need to keep up with the accelerated pace of development common in a DevOps environment—but without sacrificing the quality of the testing. That’s the real challenge.
Twitter can deliver news virtually in real time, but the quality of the “journalism” is sometimes questionable. It’s possible to microwave a meal in a matter of minutes, but few would argue that the resulting food is actually as good as the same dish prepared the old-fashioned way. When it comes to continuous performance testing, you can’t afford to sacrifice the quality of the testing in the name of expediency.
BlazeMeter thinks it has a way to address that challenge. It recently announced new functionality that allows developers to run tests using Gatling, The Grinder, Locust, Selenium, and JMeter—both locally and in the cloud—in parallel using a single, unified control language.
BlazeMeter referenced statements from Diego Lo Giudice, vice president & principal analyst for Forrester, who noted during a recent webinar the demand for software development speed is pushing teams to look at delivery cycles in terms of weeks, days, hours and even seconds.
The ability to run the tests in parallel shortens the build/test cycles. Developers can add more tests without extending the time involved in the testing cycle. Because all of the tests are run simultaneously, the total time will be only as long as the longest single test in the bunch, no matter how many tests are included in the mix. Running the tests simultaneously allows organizations to achieve greater speed without sacrificing the quality of the testing results.
“Developers that want to excel in the era of continuous delivery need tools that give them the most speed and flexibility possible,” said Andrey Pokhilko, chief scientist at BlazeMeter, in a press release. “We’ve been working with the open source community to develop ideal performance testing tools for any scenario. The new functionality combines the best of our community work with the infrastructure we’ve built up at BlazeMeter, marking a new set of capabilities to bring performance testing to new heights.”
The new BlazeMeter capability also streamlines testing by giving developers a unified control language for managing it all. BlazeMeter developed a “performance-tests-as-code” format that lets developers define tests using common YAML or JSON file formats. Testing teams can create load and performance tests as small fragments using any text editor. The BlazeMeter format enables developers to manage test logic and performance thresholds for various open source tools without needing to be an expert in the separate tools themselves.
A unified solution that allows for simultaneously running multiple test loads in parallel seems like a valuable tool for continuous performance testing. If it works as advertised, it seems BlazeMeter has combined simplicity, speed and quality in one.
