BIO

Christian Bromann is the lead engineer at the DevTools team at Sauce Labs and is constantly trying to find ways that allow to automate beyond the WebDriver protocol using browser technologies that already exist today. His passion about open source made him the core maintainer of WebdriverIO, one of the first NPM packages that brought test automation to Node.js.

Talk

Automated Performance Testing With WebDriver

Every frontend engineer is cautious about the speed of his web application, and many companies have SLAs that require their apps to be responsible after a certain time in order to not loose the attention of potential customers. Until this day, though, most web application are shipped without or just with a passive check of its performance.
Performance implications are difficult to understand and hard to predict. With Lighthouse, WebPageTest and other tools you are already able to capture tons of performance metrics of your application. However understanding and testing them often feels difficult and painful. By leveraging the browser DevTools capabilities you can enhance your functional test suite with testing methods that allow to make performance checks part of your test routine.
In this talk Christian will speak about how important performance for web applications is and what kind of implications bad performance can have on user experience, SEO and other components. Then he will shortly speak about how WebDriver works as this will be main technology he will use to automate performance tests. Next he will go into important performance metrics, talk about what they mean and how they are measured in the browser. Christian will give an overview why these metrics are important and how they are connected with the overall user experience of the page. Lastly Christian will speak about how he uses WebDriver to automate browser in order to capture performance, and how this can be used to effectively put a performance test in a CI/CD environment.