Biography

Simon is on a mission to help developers test better and write better tests. Drawing from more than a decade of experience in tech in various forms, he often speaks about DevOps, chaos engineering, testing in general, and reliability testing in particular.

Hands-on Load Testing with Open-Source Tools

During this workshop, we’ll go through how to write good, robust load tests, automate them as part of your CI pipeline, as well as visualizing the results, and how to turn that information into actions. All with a stack of open-source and freely available tools.

 Part 1: Introduction

–   Introduction to load testing

–   Terminology

–   Virtual users, RPS and QPS

–   System under Test

– Test types

– Tools

–  Load Testing Tools

–   Imperative vs. Declarative

–   Scriptable vs Static

–   Browser-based vs. Protocol-level

–   Automation

–   CI Tooling

–   Scheduled automation

–   Event-driven automation

–   Visualization

–   Raw

–   Pass/fail

–   Charts

Part 2: Planning

– Overview of the System under Test

– What do we want to know?

– What makes sense to test?

– Production vs. Staging

– User Journeys

 Part 3: Test Authoring

– HTTP Requests

– Response Assertion

– Scaling up, Ramping and Load Modelling

– Think time, Pacing and Delays

– Parameterization

– Data Correlation

– Thresholds

– Skewing factors

– Adding multiple scenarios

 Part 4: Automating the test

– Setting up the CI workflow

– Thresholds and failing builds

– Scheduling on dedicated hardware

– Using the runner for contained delta testing

Part 5: Analysis

– Introduction to Building Dashboards

– Connecting the dots with result outputs

– Metrics and which to visualize

– Dashboards continued

– Limitations of black box testing

– Improving visibility with tracing

Part 6: Use cases

– Stress testing

– Soak testing

– Load testing

– Other use cases

– Performance Monitoring

– Chaos Engineering

– Exam: Scripting Challenge

Objectives

The main goal of this workshop is to give attendees enough hands-on experience to be able to build and execute their
own performance tests as part of their current testing efforts.

Upon completing the workshop, attendees will know how to write realistic load tests that mimic real-life user behavior, how to identify what to focus their testing efforts on, how to automate their tests as well as how to visualize and interpret the results.

Target audience

The target audience for this workshop is anyone interested in getting started with performance testing using open-source tools. Basic coding/scripting knowledge (JavaScript) is a plus as the tests will be written as code.

Technical requirements

• vscode
• docker
• docker-compose
• enough admin privileges to spin-up and terminate containers
• github account