Imagine your website (or web application) adoption rates have dropped while still functioning perfectly, yet when under heavy server strain the experience becomes less effective - something which may hinder growth goals and diminish income figures significantly. Quality and speed should co-exist; rapid feature releases shouldn't come at the cost of quality. Teams no longer develop software using traditional waterfall methods - agile development has completely taken over this field. With its continuous testing/development cycle.
Continuous Integration offers several distinct advantages that increase quality in the final output, from testing every line of code, which increases caliber, to performance tests that verify responsiveness, stability, scalability, and dependability of product features designed for use on large-scale platforms. This blog explores performance testing in continuous integration (CI) perspective. Since performance testing can have an enormous impact on total TTM (time to market), many developers and businesses looking to expand their efforts take advantage of performance testing organizations' expertise to take their efforts forward more quickly.
Continuous Integration
As previously discussed, Continuous Integration (CI) is a software process in which frequent updates to source code are uploaded into a common repository for testing purposes. Project requirements will determine how long integrated code in this common repository remains tested before being removed again from testing.
Given that CI/CD pipelines execute many tests simultaneously, automated performance testing becomes an essential element. Some widely known tools that facilitate continuous integration performance testing include Apache JMeter, LoadRunner, LoadView, and LoadNinja.
Here Are Some Of The Major Steps That Are A Part Of The CI Process
- Developers push code modifications to the appropriate branch.
- The reviewers examine the modified code.
- The Pipeline's automated tests-of various kinds, such as UI, performance, etc.-
- start running as soon as the reviewer approves the changes.
- Based on the outcomes of step (3)'s tests, the build is classified as passed (or failed).
- The changes are deployed to the staging (or QA) environment if step four yields a valid result.
- Changes are selectively deployed to the Prod environment (i.e., based on the
- features that must be included in the build) if step (5) yields a Pass result.
How To Setup Performance Testing With Continuous Integration?
After discussing the fundamentals of performance testing with continuous Integration, let's take a closer look at how you can use them to create magic. The following are the main actions you need to take in order to include performance tests in the continuous integration process:
Setting Up The Test Environment
Establishing the testing environment is the initial step, just like with any other type of testing. For continuous performance testing, local infrastructure is an option, but scalability and maintainability are two big drawbacks. Rather, cloud-based performance testing tools like StormForge, WebLoad, and NeoLoad, among others, are advised. Scaling up performance tests without worrying about the infrastructure is one benefit of combining cloud performance testing with Continuous Integration.
When performing cloud-based performance testing, make sure developers and performance testers have access to all required cloud tools. Your team should then receive enough information regarding test results through extensive reporting mechanisms offered by most cloud performance testing products. As part of testing backend interactions at scale, performance testing also assesses whether cloud infrastructure could become an impediment in performing these processes properly.
Setting Up The Test Data
Three types of data are available for use in performance testing:
- Reusable information
- Non-reusable data that persists even after the test has been completed
- Reset non-reusable data following the test run
There may be times when maintaining data's state throughout test scenarios is essential to success. At any point during the tests, new information from backend sources must be extracted for use - to get the maximum benefit out of performance testing with Continuous Integration (CI), you should configure test data before including performance tests in your Pipeline.
Choose An Adequate Performance Testing Tool.
As discussed previously, performance testing can be completed both locally and on cloud infrastructures. A variety of performance testing tools such as WebLOAD, Kobiton, and LoadNinja may be chosen; popular choices among them.
Before selecting a performance testing tool, ensure it works seamlessly with other CI/CD tools such as Jenkins or Circle CI. Conducting testing in the cloud offers several distinct advantages over testing on local infrastructure. When shortlisting performance testing tools, load balancers, version control systems, internal skill sets, and similar items should all be taken into consideration.
Prioritize Application Performance Monitoring
When working with a continuous integration pipeline, performance monitoring must take place constantly. Monitoring systems should track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as CPU usage and memory consumption, as well as individual web requests, to measure progress over time.
Monitoring tests must be incorporated into an ongoing delivery pipeline for monitoring. Some popular APM tools are DataDog, New Relic, AppDynamics, DynaTrace, and OpsView; many APM solutions also work seamlessly with popular performance monitoring tools mentioned earlier.
JMeter-DataDog connections allow for monitoring JMeter test results using DataDog. Integrity between Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools and Performance Testing (PT) tools is one of the primary considerations when searching for performance testing solutions.
Execute Tests In The Pipeline
After you have your PM and APM tools available to you, the next step should be performing performance tests as part of a pipeline. How often tests should take place is determined by the nature of each project; continuous integration pipeline performance testing requires adhering to standard procedures like monitoring error rates periodically as well as invalidating tests where an error has occurred (in such scenarios).
If the code needs to be tested on production servers, additional tests need to be run. There's no set frequency; instead, it should depend on factors like target market size, feature complexity, and other considerations in your product development cycle.
Analyze Test Results
One of the key components of any automated testing program is reporting and performance monitoring. Managers, engineers and other technical team members must understand what results have been produced through employing performance testing automation tools or Application Performance Monitoring systems (APM). Performance testing solutions often feature connections to popular test reporting platforms in order to provide more comprehensive test results.
Read More: 7 Key Benefits Of CI/CD: How Implementing CI/CD Save Your Business?
Automating Continuous Integration and Deployment Performance Testing
Automated performance testing has quickly become an essential element of agile and rapid release cycles software development teams, becoming an integral component of development through Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines that help teams identify and address performance issues early in the development cycle - shortening time-to-market, increasing software quality, and decreasing expenses associated with post-launch performance issues as key benefits of automating performance testing through CI/CD automation.
Automated performance testing provides developers with valuable information about how code changes impact performance. Through using performance tests in their CI/CD pipeline, developers can quickly assess whether changes have positive or negative implications on system performance; providing developers with all of the knowledge they require when considering tradeoffs between functionality, performance, and maintainability.
Automated performance testing can assist in the early identification and resolution of performance problems from both an engineering perspective and a quality assurance viewpoint. By adding performance tests into their Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines, quality assurance teams can identify issues before they become systemic issues, thus minimizing time and effort spent tracking down any uncovered performance problems post-release. CI/CD can be used to automate performance testing in the following ways:
- Install a Performance Testing Tool: JMeter, Gatling, and Apache Bench are among several popular performance testing technologies on the market that may help teams automate performance tests as part of their build processes through plugins or scripts that integrate these technologies with CI/CD pipelines.
- Employ a Cloud-Based Performance Testing Service: Performance testing can be automated using cloud services like LoadRunner Cloud and BlazeMeter, providing teams with the tools they need to evaluate system performance under various loads and simulate heavy user traffic simulation. By including such services in your CI/CD pipeline, teams can ensure your system can withstand anticipated loads without strain, automating performance testing at scale.
- Use Performance Test Assertions: Performance test assertions enable teams to set acceptable performance levels for metrics like error rate, throughput, and response time in your application using performance testing automation tools such as regression testing or unit tests. When an assertion fails, or an assertion cannot be fulfilled automatically by regression tests or performance testing frameworks, builds may fail, and your team may investigate why.
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Conclusion
Websites and apps targeted toward broad user experience bases now must conduct performance tests regularly as part of a Continuous Integration (CI) in order to speed quality releases more rapidly. As this article shows, to maximize test outcomes when running tests in your continuous integration pipeline it is advisable to invest in cloud-based performance testing tools as shown here. Likewise, its integration portfolio should also be assessed.
Suppose your team lacks performance testing experience in-house. In that case, outsourcing QA will prove beneficial in providing continuous Integration and performance testing capabilities to their product features for usability, scalability, and dependability. Performance testing providers possess vast expertise when it comes to performance testing, which can prove instrumental when evaluating features for usability, scalability, and dependability analysis, among many other areas.
