Week of Testing: Day 2 - Comparing tests against a baseline

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:21:53 +0100

Day 2 of my Week of Testing!

Yesterday I ran my first load test on k6, and actually set up the thresholds wrong. I still maintain that there are some UI improvements that could still be made in that area, and that feedback was well-received. Apparently I’m not the only one who has made the same mistake.

Today I learned that on k6, you can actually set one test to be a baseline. There’s so much I want to say on this topic - that’s probably a whole blog post there - but for now, suffice it to say that having a baseline test to compare succeeding tests to is a key to a successful round of load testing. I was happy to see that k6 thinks so too, because that functionality is built into the UI by default.

I also think that being able to schedule a test regularly is fantastic for practicing Continuous Testing. Of course, teams already using CI/CD pipelines would probably get the most benefit out of running load tests using the command line rather than through the UI, but it’s nice to know that scheduling is an option in the UI as well.

Week of Testing: Day 1 - Running a load test on k6

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 19:13:03 +0100

On my first real day of testing with k6.io, I wanted to jump right in and figure out how to run a load test on k6 Cloud. k6 has documentation on this, but I didn’t use it for this test, since the point of a week of testing is to record how easy the product is to use.

My verdict: I’m pleasantly surprised with how easily everything went. Is it just me, or was that AWS startup time exceptionally fast? I’m used to AWS taking at least a couple of minutes to provision a machine, but this seemed to start up almost instantaneously.

Aws on Nicole van der Hoeven

Week of Testing: Day 2 - Comparing tests against a baseline

Week of Testing: Day 1 - Running a load test on k6