My Journey into the World of Performance and Load Testing

By an innovative use of functional test scripts running in a Continuous Testing Server with load testing capability.

Most of my articles are about E2E (via UI) test automation, i.e., black-box functional testing. I also invented a new performance and load testing approach utilising functional UI tests and Continuous Testing with parallel execution. In 2016, I accomplished a major load-testing challenge for a large tech company with this approach, in a matter of days. This article tells this story.

In 2018, Business Wire referred to real-browser-load-testing as “Groundbreaking Technology”.

My Innovative Solution to Load Testing: Run Selenium Tests (in real browsers) in a CT Server with Parallel Execution for better Load Testing.

I switched my day work from Programming (as a 10X lead Java Contractor) to End-to-end Automated Testing (as a test automation engineer) in ~2010. For whys? Check out this story series.

In 2016, I worked as a contract test automation (functional) consultant in a large tech company (with ~500 IT staff). My first task, as usual, was to rescue the failing/failed E2E (via UI) Test Automation. The team pretty much has just given up test automation. The sole manual tester was doing all the testing.

I asked the software engineer (involved with test automation) to show me test automation scripts and test execution history. It was typical.

• The so-called “custom framework” (‘created’ by a test architect) was really just a simple syntax tier over Selenium WebDriver.

• The scripts in Groovy (a team member told me that the test architect wanted a syntax like Ruby but preferred Java Stack. Then I asked, “Why don’t use Ruby directly?”)

• Test execution was in a Jenkins CI server, very unreliably. To give you a feel of how bad it was, the suite was split into several suites. A full execution would take about 20 hours, with 20–30% test failures. Then, manual testers needed to follow up.
  No wonder the test automation has been given up. The last complete run in Jenkins was a month ago.

On Day 1, I converted several test scripts in raw Selenium WebDriver + RSpec with the help of the manual tester. The manual tester showed great interest in learning, so I mentored her.