Continuous Testing on Nicole van der Hoeven

How Gitlab uses k6 for load testing, with Grant Young (k6 Office Hours #27)

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 18:13:26 +0200

Grant Young, Software Engineer in Test at GitLab, joined k6 OSS maintainer Mihail Stoykov and me to talk about how GitLab uses k6. Apparently, they began using k6 internally some time ago, and because they like to eat their own dogfood and use GitLab to test GitLab, they also incorporated k6 into GitLab so that their users could reap the benefits, too.

Here’s the GitLab documentation about how to do load testing in GitLab, and here’s a k6 blog post on how to set it up!

How to do continuous performance testing, with Lee Barnes (k6 Office Hours #26)

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 09:34:13 +0200

Lee Barnes and I got connected because we are both speaking at TestCon Europe 2021 this year, and I thought it would be nice to have a chat with him before the conference to get a sneak peek at what he’s presenting about: continuous performance testing. Lee is the CEO of Utopia Solutions, and he’s been in the testing industry for decades, so I really appreciated his insights on where the industry is going.

Catch Lee’s talk here and mine here!

How to add performance testing to CI/CD pipelines using k6 and GitHub Actions

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 22:26:20 +0200

Continuous testing means verifying and improving software quality at all stages, including development. It can sound like something only large companies do, but it’s an approach I use even for this personal blog that you’re reading this on.

Every new blog post or change I make to this site automatically triggers the execution of a small test. This test, when run over time, lets me see whether changes I’ve made have been detrimental to site performance. Here’s a video on my setup:

Load testing and Azure DevOps with José Luis Latorre Millas (k6 Office Hours #20)

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 21:08:36 +0200

José Luis Latorre Millas, Developer Community Lead and Software Architect at Swiss Life AG, joined Simme and me on k6 Office Hours to talk about how he personally uses k6 with Azure DevOps to add load testing to his team’s CI/CD pipeline.

I got to know José from the k6 Community Slack workspace when he mentioned that he would be presenting on k6 in a few meetups. I went to his livestream with CrossDvlUp (Spanish) and enjoyed his approach, so I knew I wanted to have him on. It’s always great to have real users of k6 (both of the OSS and the commercial Cloud option) talk about how they personally use k6 and even what they found lacking in the tool.

José’s multi-scenario template repo: https://github.com/SwissLife-OSS/K6-MultiScenario-template

Register to watch José’s talk at Azure Summit 2021, later this year: https://azuresummit.live/speaker/jose-luis-latorre-millas/

Using CircleCI and environment variables with k6 (k6 Office Hours)

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 21:53:09 +0100

Simme and I decided to take this week to answer questions on k6 Office Hours, and we ended up talking about CircleCI, environment variables, and how to use them with k6.

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.