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  • Testing Challenges in 2022 – Techstrong TV

    Testing Challenges in 2022 – Techstrong TV

    Stephen and Alan discuss the biggest testing challenges in 2022, along with the tools and methods needed to solve them. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.

    Recording:              This is Digital Anarchist.

     Alan Shimel:            Hey everyone. Welcome to another Techstrong TV interview here. My guest for this segment is Stephen Feloney of BlazeMeter. I think it’s BlazeMeter by Perforce. Is that correct Steve?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    That’s correct.  

     

    Alan Shimel:            Yep. And for those who aren’t familiar of course Blaze Meter was originally founded by a friend of mine Alon Girmonsky. Great story around one of the pioneers in open source testing and continuous testing. Blaze Meter was acquired I guess it had to be six years ago, maybe more, by at the time called CA or CA Technologies, Computer Associates. Then it always kind of operated kind of semi autonomously. And then I guess it was last year they found a great home with the folks at Perforce who have also been around a while. And Perforce is of course a leader and really expanded their capabilities from code repository to testing and so many other things. So it was a good match, Blaze Meter and Perforce. We’re happy to see it. Steven so I gave the Blaze Meter story but I can’t give the Stephen Feloney story. I need you to do it.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Oh well we’ll need hours to give my story.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Give us the short version.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    So I’ve been in testing more or less for 20 some odd years. I came to CA must have been seven or eight years ago. And I was part of the team responsible for acquiring Blaze Meter into CA. And I always had plans for Blaze Meter. And as you mentioned it sort of ran autonomous inside of CA. And then CA was acquired by Broadcom and then once we were in Broadcom I was able to expand Blaze Meter to go beyond performance and we added a multitude of features, virtual services, API testing, API monitoring, grew all that. And now as you said we found a very good home with Perforce and that acquisition happened right at the end of October of last year.

     

    But I’ve been doing product management work for, I don’t know, about 15 – 16 years almost exclusively in the testing space, a little bit in the mobile space and a little bit in the monitoring space. And what’s interesting is moving around going from testing to mobile development and mobile testing and then into monitoring I now have all of that with Perfecto and Blaze Meter coming together at Perforce. So I have the monitoring. I have the mobile. I have – it’s all coming together. So everything I’ve learned over the years I can make it all come together and work in one spot.

     

    Alan Shimel:            So give us your best Dr. Evil and tell us isn’t it great when something comes together like that?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Yeah. It’s fantastic and I hope to make one billion dollars.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Absolutely. Good stuff Steve. So look. Let’s first of all we’ve had the pleasure of talking to several of the Blaze Meter folks since the acquisition by Perforce. And it really does seem to be a good match. But what I wanted to kind of focus in on today is maybe the state of continuous testing if you will and then a little bit of what specifically at Blaze Meter what’s new. What’s coming down the pike that we can be on the lookout for here.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Sure. Sure. So Blaze Meter historically has been a performance testing solution built upon open source as you mentioned and we were, we play two different roles. We work with centers of excellence who are doing large, massive load tests. And then we work in a shift left world with agile teams. And we were noticing struggles when it came to testing with the agile teams. So when you’re looking at continuous testing, continuous testing is well, a continuum. So it starts off with the development and the agile groups, works along sometimes into a full end to end testing and then continues into production.

     

    And so if we talk about that continuum we look down at the agile teams and we noticed that they were struggling. They weren’t testing as much as they should. And we interviewed dozens of different companies to try to understand what were their challenges with this. And there were a multitude of challenges. One is they didn’t like using multiple different tools to try to get all the testing done, whether it’s a functional test, a performance test, an API test, unit test, all different types of testing, all of these different tools. Some have to be downloaded onto our devices. Some are in the Cloud. They all have different UIs, reporting. That’s a challenge. And then another challenge was we don’t have time to get data. I mean think about it. When you’re testing you need data.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Yeah.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    But it wasn’t just data to run the test because why can’t you do that. Then I need data for the back end system and then I need data if I don’t have my full environments and I’m using mock services or virtual services I now need data for that. How do I get all that data in and make sure it’s all in sync? Because when I’m developing code I have a very limited time to develop that code and get it out the door and if I have to spend time trying to figure out get all this data and sync all this data together, that’s a challenge.

     

    And then well with that challenge as I mentioned I don’t have my full environment. So now I need virtual services. Where do I get those? Who is developing those? And then I have to figure out what data did they put in? So the mock services, the virtual services as well as the data, two big problems that are hindering people from getting their testing done. And then we have other issues around how do I generation my test. I just want to develop. I don’t want to spend my time creating all these tests. So those are challenges there and then on the flip side if I’m trying to do continuous testing and I’m trying to continue the testing into production what tests do I set up.

     

    How do I monitor? How do I test in production when I don’t know what I tested, when there’s not a full collaboration across the entire value stream? How do I know what to test in production? Who is creating those tests? Do you have your ops team and are they monitoring or testing the same things that I wanted to test or that I did test in preproduction? So those are quite a few of the challenges that people run into when they’re trying to do continuous testing and continuous testing at scale.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Absolutely and emphasis on that scale because really that’s where you start seeing the cracks. That’s where you start seeing – when you’re not at scale sometimes you could muscle it. Right? Or fake it even. But when you start hitting scale man, it’s like whatever your weakest points are they’re going to just come right to the forefront.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    That’s correct.

     

    Alan Shimel:            You’re doing to say oh my goodness. This doesn’t scale. Right?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    No. That’s right because you could have like one group, one team, one service that’s able to do something that’s special, unique and they could get that out the door in their own special way. But when you’re trying to scale that either that service or application has grown or you’re trying to scale it in an enterprise as you just said all the cracks show. The whole thing falls apart.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Agreed. All right. Let’s talk about what’s new at Blaze Meter then. What are we doing to help?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Well surprisingly a lot of the challenges I just mentioned we’re able to solve just coincidental.

     

    Alan Shimel:            I’m shocked.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    I’m shocked as well. I mean I didn’t know this was coming. Yeah. So one of the things we actually just released on February 3rd was our Blaze Meter test data piece of Blaze Meter. And this combined the ability to whether it’s for performance testing, functional testing, API testing we can generate the data that you need. And that data that gets generated is not just to generate the data to drive a test. We’ll also generate the data if you’re using mock services or virtual services, generate the data for that as well and generate data for system undertests.

     

    And the idea is all that stays in sync. And we’ll generate the data at the time you want to run the test. So now you don’t have to worry about managing, maintaining the data sets. You don’t have to worry about that. We will generate the data on the fly and to run the tests and to ensure that all that data is in sync. That takes away a lot of the false positives that you’ve seen in the past where things are failing. Oh but it turns out it was the data in the virtual service or the system under test wasn’t set up the right way. And so all of that goes away and you don’t have to put any thought into it.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Crazy. It’s crazy that no one has thought of this before or kind of implemented this before when it seems rather elementary at some level. Like of course if you want to do this. But I had a conversation with the last guest here on Tech Strong TV and we spoke about the issue is maturation issue. Right? Until your devops processes, until your CICD processes are at such a level of maturity. Right, you don’t even run into this problem because you have problems that pop up before it that kind of take your focus away.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Correct. Yeah. So in the past what’s happened is when you were handing it off to a testing team the testing team was used to the problem and they had time to get the data. They had time to set up the data. They had a gold copy of the data sitting around that they would use. They were familiar with it. But as you’re saying the CICD process, the shift left process happened the data problem, the virtualization problem is completely exacerbated. ‘Cause they don’t have the time. They don’t have the ability. They don’t have the skill set. They don’t have the desire to do all that. They want to get their code that they developed and they want to get that out the door as quickly as possible. And testing is sometimes seen as a hindrance. It’s a necessary evil – going back to Dr. Evil. A necessary evil if you will.

     

    And so anything that we can do to accelerate that and make it much easier for them that is the challenge. So yeah. You could say why wouldn’t someone have done this whole data thing. There are synthetic data generators. Right? There’s open source synthetic data generators. That’s fine. But that just generates the data in one spot. You still have to figure out how to take that, pull that out, put that here, put that there, put that there. And we’re taking care of all of that for you.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Got it. Very cool. Hey. For people wanting to get more information on that Stephen where can they go?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    They can go to blazemeter.com.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Just straight up right on the front page?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Yeah. Just right on the front page. It’s our newest part of our release so you’ll see it there. You’ll see blogs. You’ll see help. We have multiple discussions on it. Yep.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Very cool. Hey. We’re coming up on time here. Anything else coming down the pike or you wanted to let our audience know about?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Yeah. So there’s actually quite a few things that are coming down the pike. But one of the more interesting things that we are working on is one of the challenges that I had mentioned is generating tests. So they don’t want to spend the time to even generate the tests. And there’s two things that come with that. One is just generating your API tests. So we’re going to have coming soon an API test generator to help with that and that is combined with our well synthetic data gen. So those two are combined together to help generate that. The next thing that comes which is a natural evolution is you don’t just want positive tests. You need negative tests as well.

     

    And so that data gen is going to auto generate negative tests for you whether it’s negative data driving a test, putting negative data into your system test or having negative things happen with those mock services or those virtual services. So you want to delay a virtual service. You want to knock a virtual service so it doesn’t respond or just provide different types of data sets to see how well and how robust your system is. And once you do that the next step is all right. So I have negative testing. Then you combine the positive and negative together and now you have chaos testing. And so those are coming down as well.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Cool. Love it. Any – I don’t want to hold your feet to the fire, make you say anything you’re not supposed to say but what’s timeframes on those if you can talk about them?

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Well I’ll say this. By the end of the year you’ll see this. I don’t want to give solid timeframes but this year those will be coming out the door.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Ok. I think that’s fair Stephen. Hey. I want to thank you for coming on and updating, getting us up to speed here.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Yeah. Thank you very much.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Continued success. We’re hoping maybe at some point we’ll see Blaze Meter at a real live conference.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Oh I’m hoping to get to real live conference. As much as I enjoy maybe not traveling as much. But the interpersonal interaction.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Yeah, no. We all miss it.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Yeah. I mean it’s a needed. It’s a must.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Absolutely man. Hey. Steve Feloney. BlazeMeter powered by Perforce here on Techstrong TV. We’re going to take a break and we’ll be right back with another guest.

     

    Stephen Feloney:    Thank you very much.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Thanks Steve.

     

     

    [End of Audio]

     

  • Perforce Charts Testing Course After BlazeMeter Acquisition

    Perforce Charts Testing Course After BlazeMeter Acquisition

    Perforce Software has acquired BlazeMeter from Broadcom as part of an effort to extend the scope of its testing tools beyond the Perfecto tools for testing mobile and web applications it acquired in 2018.

    Broadcom gained control over BlazeMeter after it acquired CA Technologies in 2018. CA Technologies acquired BlazeMeter in 2016. Terms of the latest acquisition involving BlazeMeter were not disclosed.

    Tim Russell, chief product officer for Perforce, said BlazeMeter adds a complete platform that spans everything from load and performance testing to application programming interface (API) testing. The goal is to enable DevOps teams to push continuous testing further left as part of an effort to accelerate the development and deployment of applications, added Russell.

    The need for continuous testing has become more pronounced as more organizations launch multiple digital business transformation initiatives, noted Russell. The real challenge will be finding ways to embed continuous testing within DevOps processes at a sufficient level of scale, added Russell.

    In fact, the quality of the digital experience those applications provide ultimately determines the degree to which those efforts are likely to succeed, which Russell noted is why so many enterprise IT organizations are reengineering their application testing processes.

    In general, organizations are taking two paths to shift testing further left. Some are giving application performance testing tools to developers to employ during DevOps sprints while others are trying to bring application testers into the application development process earlier. In some cases, organizations are doing both as part of a comprehensive effort to discover issues before applications are deployed in a production environment. Those issue are naturally more expensive to fix after an application has been deployed.

    Perforce, for now, expects to continue to make BlazeMeter and Perfecto available as a set of complementary cloud-based services with some cross-pollination of capabilities occurring over time, said Russell.

    In the longer term, it’s apparent that more artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics will be embedded within cloud-based platforms that can collect enough data to build meaningful models of development processes. IT teams should also expect to see testing tools make greater use of computer vision algorithms to surface issues.

    One away or another, the entire application testing process is about to become a lot more automated as more organizations are simultaneously building multiple applications. That may not necessarily reduce the need for either a developer or tester to create and manage that process, but it does mean the amount of testing time required for each application should continue to steadily decline in the months and years ahead.

    Hopefully, all that effort will lead to better application experiences being provided to end users more consistently. There is nothing quite as frustrating for any application development team than to discover that 90% of the functionality of an application is not being used because end users are not able to easily surface it. Worse yet, of course, is when an application turns out to be too slow once it is deployed. In either case, it’s difficult to regain that initial end-user enthusiasm for any new application experience after it’s been lost, simply because no one thought through all the use cases that should have been tested much earlier in the application development life cycle.

  • BlazeMeter Adds Additional Functionality to Evolve From a Continuous Testing Tool to a Continuous Testing Platform

    Broadcom Inc. announced today the availability of BlazeMeter Continuous Testing, a single platform for complete continuous testing at enterprise scale.

    BlazeMeter, already a market leader in performance testing, has expanded the capabilities of their platform to cover additional functionalities to enable full continuous testing. Now, development teams have full 360 degree visibility into their internal and public facing applications from pre-development stages through to post development monitoring.

    BlazeMeter’s new Continuous Testing platform enables developers, testers and DevOps engineers to control all aspects of testing in one place for ultimate collaboration. This includes creating and managing test assets, creating mock services, running GUI Functional tests, performance tests, API testing and API monitoring.

    BlazeMeter continues to be a significant contributor to open source development, and the BlazeMeter Continuous Testing Platform supports the integration of over 20 popular open source tools, including JMeter, Selenium, WireMock and many others.

    “Businesses need to deliver innovation faster, with quality, in order to provide exceptional end-customer experiences that set them apart in the marketplace. To do this they need to embrace digital transformation and agility at scale. Traditional methodologies and legacy tools cannot keep pace with agile teams. BlazeMeter Continuous Testing Platform helps organizations shift left with a single application that allows teams to work the way they want to work, and collaborate for greater efficiency and quality,” said Ashok Reddy, SVP and GM of the Broadcom Enterprise Software Division.

    BlazeMeter was acquired by Broadcom as part of their acquisition of CA Technologies in November 2018.

    About Broadcom:

    Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) is a global technology leader that designs, develops and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions. Broadcom’s category-leading product portfolio serves critical markets including data center, networking, enterprise software, broadband, wireless, storage and industrial. Our solutions include data center networking and storage, enterprise and mainframe software focused on automation, monitoring and security, smartphone components, telecoms and factory automation. For more information, go to www.broadcom.com. Broadcom, the pulse logo, Tomahawk and Connecting everything are among the trademarks of Broadcom. The term “Broadcom” refers to Broadcom Inc., and/or its subsidiaries. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

    For more information, sign up for our free tier plan at www.blazemeter.com, join our webinar to learn more, or visit our blog.

  • Avoid Crashes: 5 Best Practices for Load Testing

    Avoid Crashes: 5 Best Practices for Load Testing

    Demanding customer expectations and the rapid distribution of information across social media have made website and applications crashes an off-limits path for today’s companies and organizations.

    Crashes resulting from traffic spikes cause immediate and long-term loss of sales, as well as tarnishing the brand name. When servers or websites go down during highly anticipated events such as Black Friday, the Big Game or before a major concert, the repercussions can be permanent.

    Yet, avoiding the “website temporarily unavailable” screen is also easier than ever before. By performance testing your website continuously and proactively you can easily detect errors, bottlenecks and bugs, and then fix them to ensure your website handles any amount of traffic.

    Here are five best practices for load testing your website or app:

    Define Your Load Goals

    Before starting your tests, you need to figure out what it is that you need to test.

    This includes the number of concurrent users, traffic patterns and areas that users can visit on your site. For example, if your site has 10,000 users concurrent at its peak, but  3,000 arrive in the morning and that total slowly climbs up to 10,000 in the afternoon—and these visitors mostly just browse your homepage—you’ll need to run a different test than if you have 10,000 concurrent users on your website all day long, constantly browsing multiple pages.

    To determine your load goals, you need to engage directly with your business colleagues. For instance, get your product manager to set the system’s expected abilities, ask the marketing team to inform you about any special campaigns that might increase website traffic, and then look at server logs and tools such as Google Analytics to determine previous customer patterns.

    Choose Your Load Testing Tools

    There are multiple open-source load-testing tools that you can use to run your tests.

    JMeter is the most popular tool, but you can also use Gatling, Locust, Tsung, The Grinder or Selenium. See here to learn more about the differences between these toolsets.

    Does this seem complicated? Taurus is an open-source automation test framework that simplifies running these tools, by using a simple YAML script. If you need to run your tests from the cloud, utilizing rich analytics or requiring user collaboration, you might consider using BlazeMeter.

    Take Your System to the Limit

    To make sure you stand up to your load goals, you need a buffer; specifically, you need to make sure that your system can handle heavier loads.

    This ensures that the CPU stays low and you don’t experience memory leaks. However, we also recommend you take your system to the limit and see when and how it fails. This ensures that you know exactly what your system’s weaknesses are, giving you a better ability to fix any errors that might occur.

    This is especially important if you come across an unexpected traffic spike—say, if your competitor’s website crashes and all their customers come running to you. Wouldn’t you rather be prepared for that?

    Monitor Test Results

    Set aside resources for looking at test results.

    Examine KPIs including Response Time and Hits/s, as well as the correlations between them, to learn what your system’s abilities and bottlenecks are. This information will help you see what needs fixing.

    As you continue testing over time, you will be able to identify KPI trends, which will help you monitor system health. We also recommend you monitor backend KPIs like DB Queries, with APM tools.

    Test Again

    So, you’ve tested, you’ve analyzed, and you’ve fixed.

    Now you have one last thing to do: Run your tests again to make sure everything is working smoothly after the committed changes. That ensures nothing gets overlooked. It would be a shame if all your hard work went down the drain due to a minor oversight.

    Now, let’s get testing!

    To get more load testing tips, check out this free whitepaper, “How to Ensure Your Website or App Won’t Fail at Peak Times.” To learn more about BlazeMeter, request a demo.

    — Noga Cohen

  • Webinar: Efficient Performance Test Automation – Optimizing the Jenkins Pipeline

    Webinar: Efficient Performance Test Automation – Optimizing the Jenkins Pipeline

    Shift-left testing represents a huge opportunity within the context of DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and integrating performance tests into your Continuous Integration scope greatly reduces performance risks when adding a new feature, or fixing a bug.

    Even better – adding performance tests into the widely used Jenkins Pipeline is easier than you might think. In this webinar, co-presented by CA BlazeMeter and CloudBees, we’ll offer practical tips and best practices for leveraging performance test automation in a continuous integration environment.

    In this webinar we’ll cover:

    • How to easily implement a project’s entire build/test/deploy pipeline in Jenkins and store that alongside existing code
    • How to configure and execute realistic, large-scale performance-testing scenarios as part of the Continuous Integration process
    • Enabling easy test configuration maintenance using the open source test automation tool Taurus along with Jenkins Pipeline
    • Analyzing comprehensive performance test results in real-time, and integrating those results as a part of the build promotion criteria

    Extend the impact of performance testing across the software delivery pipeline and the popular tools your teams are already using.

     RECORDING

    SLIDES

    [slideshare id=72705475&doc=slidesfortodayswebinar-170301171123]

    — Jules Louis

  • CA Technologies to Acquire BlazeMeter to Drive Speed and Quality of Application Testing Practices

    NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire BlazeMeter, a leader in open source-based continuous application performance testing. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close by year end.

    The acquisition of privately-held BlazeMeter will enable CA Technologies to extend its DevOps portfolio. BlazeMeter will seamlessly integrate with CA’s continuous delivery solutions to further improve testing efficiency and accelerate the deployment of applications.

    “BlazeMeter has redefined performance testing with its simplicity, fast-deployment SaaS model, and rapid time-to-value,” said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer, CA Technologies. “The acquisition will reinforce our leadership position in continuous testing, and our efforts to democratize performance testing as organizations accelerate their DevOps journey to drive speed and quality in the delivery of new software updates and innovations.”

    As development teams move to Agile and continuous delivery practices to improve time-to-market of applications, enterprises are struggling to keep up. Testing speed is the major bottleneck in getting applications released faster. With BlazeMeter’s solution, developers and performance engineers can test earlier and often in the application lifecycle to improve their test coverage and avoid encountering performance problems too close to production.

    “Developers and performance engineers want to achieve superior test coverage by using open source tools and tools that can integrate well into the developer ecosystem,” said Alon Girmonsky, founder and CEO, BlazeMeter. “Joining forces with CA Technologies will enable BlazeMeter to continue developing our technology while enjoying the vast resources of CA Technologies to better serve our customers.”

    BlazeMeter’s commercial, self-service continuous application performance testing solution is fully compatible with Apache JMeter™ as well as other open source software tools like Selenium, Gatling and Locust.

    Founded in 2011, BlazeMeter has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and Palo Alto, Calif.

    About CA Technologies

    CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business in every industry. From planning, to development, to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact, and communicate – across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at www.ca.com.

    — Jules Louis

  • BlazeMeter Contributes Latest Developments to the JMeter Ecosystem

    BlazeMeter speeds up testing for JMeter users with a Step-by-Step Debugger and Keyboard Shortcuts, demonstrates open source test orchestration tool Taurus at Velocity Conference

    SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–BlazeMeter, the leader in open source-based continuous performance testing, today released a number of key contributions to the JMeter community, helping to advance JMeter from a scripting and load generation tool to a more complete environment where practitioners can develop, debug and execute tests.

    “We’ve heard from developers that several common functionalities could be improved, so we worked on capabilities that make for an easier and more productive experience with JMeter.”

    Tweet this

    Leading the list is the BlazeMeter Step-by-Step Debugger, which simplifies and expedites script development in JMeter 3.0 by allowing testers to debug scripts step-by-step and receive updates in real time. Testers can also skip over the step-by-step approach by setting breakpoints and running scripts until that breakpoint is reached. Now JMeter users can easily pinpoint precisely where the components are executed, understand how JMeter scoping works and, for the first time ever, view the execution order of the test plan. The debugger provides testers with a professional-grade tool to speed design and troubleshooting of sophisticated tests. A detailed guide on how to install and use the debugger is available on the BlazeMeter blog.

    Additionally, a new Keyboard Shortcuts feature dramatically speeds scripting with an entirely new way to drop components into the test plan. Instead of manually inspecting menus to find components, JMeter users can select the command key with another predefined key, enabling them to build entire test plans with a series of keystrokes. As a core JMeter feature, Keyboard Shortcuts is available to all users by default when they install JMeter 3.0. For a demo of this and other helpful new features in JMeter 3.0, view our recent webcast: What’s New in JMeter 3.0 and Q&A.

    BlazeMeter’s Chief Scientist Andrey Pokhilko also released the Plugins Manager — a faster and easier way to work with JMeter Plugins. Historically, installing and removing plugins by downloading file bundles was a complex and manual process that often resulted in menus cluttered with extra plugins. The Plugins Manager eliminates these issues by enabling JMeter users to install and remove plugins through one simple user interface.

    “We’re always looking to develop new features that support the core JMeter community,” said Pokhilko. “We’ve heard from developers that several common functionalities could be improved, so we worked on capabilities that make for an easier and more productive experience with JMeter.”

    “The BlazeMeter Step-by-Step Debugger adds professional-grade power to test development and speeds onboarding of developers and seasoned test practitioners to JMeter,” said Dave Karow, Director of Product Marketing at BlazeMeter. “Andrey’s Plugins Manager reduces complexity and the Keyboard Shortcut feature enables power users to create test plans in the blink of an eye. These features come directly from our engagement with hundreds of enterprise customers who want to move faster and more confidently with JMeter as they distribute responsibility for performance testing out to agile teams, closer to where development occurs.”

    BlazeMeter’s open source initiatives extend beyond the scope of its JMeter contributions. The company continues to support and enhance the open source project Taurus, which offers an automation friendly framework for continuous testing using JMeter and other leading open source tools.

    At Velocity Santa Clara 2016, Pokhilko will reveal how Taurus can bring load testing up a level by adding a consistent layer of automation and a wider scope of functionality to existing open source tools. Specifically, he will be presenting ‘Take Your Load Testing Up a Notch With Open Source Tools’ at 2:10 p.m. on Thursday, June 23. For more details, click on the link here.

    About BlazeMeter
    BlazeMeter ensures delivery of high-performance software by enabling DevOps teams to quickly and easily run open-source based performance tests against any mobile app, website or API at massive scale to validate performance at every stage of software delivery. The rapidly growing BlazeMeter community has over 100,000 developers and includes prominent global brands such as Adobe, Atlassian, Gap, NBC Universal, Pfizer and Walmart as customers. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with Research & Development in Tel Aviv, Israel.

    For more information, create a free account at www.blazemeter.com, visit our blog or find us on Twitter @BlazeMeter and onLinkedIn.

  • Continuous Testing Improves Speed, Quality

    Continuous Testing Improves Speed, Quality

    We live in a world that expects immediacy. For a society that gets news updates from Twitter in 140-character increments as it happens while we microwave a complete meal in less than five minutes, anything that takes months—or even weeks or days—seems like an eternity.

    When it comes to continuous performance testing, organizations and developers need to keep up with the accelerated pace of development common in a DevOps environment—but without sacrificing the quality of the testing. That’s the real challenge.

    Twitter can deliver news virtually in real time, but the quality of the “journalism” is sometimes questionable. It’s possible to microwave a meal in a matter of minutes, but few would argue that the resulting food is actually as good as the same dish prepared the old-fashioned way. When it comes to continuous performance testing, you can’t afford to sacrifice the quality of the testing in the name of expediency.

    BlazeMeter thinks it has a way to address that challenge. It recently announced new functionality that allows developers to run tests using Gatling, The Grinder, Locust, Selenium, and JMeter—both locally and in the cloud—in parallel using a single, unified control language.

    BlazeMeter referenced statements from Diego Lo Giudice, vice president & principal analyst for Forrester, who noted during a recent webinar the demand for software development speed is pushing teams to look at delivery cycles in terms of weeks, days, hours and even seconds.

    The ability to run the tests in parallel shortens the build/test cycles. Developers can add more tests without extending the time involved in the testing cycle. Because all of the tests are run simultaneously, the total time will be only as long as the longest single test in the bunch, no matter how many tests are included in the mix. Running the tests simultaneously allows organizations to achieve greater speed without sacrificing the quality of the testing results.

    “Developers that want to excel in the era of continuous delivery need tools that give them the most speed and flexibility possible,” said Andrey Pokhilko, chief scientist at BlazeMeter, in a press release. “We’ve been working with the open source community to develop ideal performance testing tools for any scenario. The new functionality combines the best of our community work with the infrastructure we’ve built up at BlazeMeter, marking a new set of capabilities to bring performance testing to new heights.”

    The new BlazeMeter capability also streamlines testing by giving developers a unified control language for managing it all. BlazeMeter developed a “performance-tests-as-code” format that lets developers define tests using common YAML or JSON file formats. Testing teams can create load and performance tests as small fragments using any text editor. The BlazeMeter format enables developers to manage test logic and performance thresholds for various open source tools without needing to be an expert in the separate tools themselves.

    A unified solution that allows for simultaneously running multiple test loads in parallel seems like a valuable tool for continuous performance testing. If it works as advertised, it seems BlazeMeter has combined simplicity, speed and quality in one.

  • BlazeMeter Uses the Force of Performance Testing to Prepare MovieTickets.com for the Release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”

    SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Movie releases are major traffic events for online ticket providers. So when the most storied movie franchise in history comes out with a new chapter, it creates a unique performance challenge. That’s whyMovieTickets.com, a worldwide leader in advance movie ticketing, turned to BlazeMeter to ensure that its new Amazon Web Services infrastructure could manage the volume of online ticket orders around opening weekend for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

    The majority of online advance ticket buying occurs 1-2 weeks prior to a release date, but the release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” marked a historically unique buying trend, as MovieTickets.com was inundated with pre-orders months prior to the film’s December 2015 release date.

    “The demand for advance ticketing during the first buying opportunity was unprecedented,” said Craig Lefkowitz, Director of Infrastructure Systems at MovieTickets.com. “We had not seen that type of volume two months before a movie release, so we needed to make sure we were well prepared for opening weekend.”

    To prepare its site to meet demand, MovieTickets.com wanted to upgrade its infrastructure to manage spikes in volume, migrating to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment that could scale alongside demand. However, in order to make sure the new cloud-based infrastructure could perform optimally, the company enlisted the help of BlazeMeter’s continuous performance testing technology.

    “We chose BlazeMeter because it’s the leader in performance testing,” said Lefkowitz. “BlazeMeter is a standout and very well-respected in the industry. We needed to utilize a proven solution to get us ready for such an important event.”

    MovieTickets.com used BlazeMeter’s performance testing solution to examine various load volumes and times across the AWS infrastructure. A member of the AWS CodePipeline partner network, inaugural DevOps Competency Program member and trusted partner, BlazeMeter’s testing solution can integrate directly into an AWS DevOps or continuous delivery framework, identifying trouble spots in real-time and readying the site for major traffic events.

    With BlazeMeter’s help, MovieTickets.com tested their infrastructure to manage more than 30,000 simultaneous users per second. As they continued to extend their infrastructure, that number expanded to more than 300,000 concurrent visitors.

    “The higher the performance expectation from an event, the greater the need to ensure an infrastructure can support the required service level,” said Alon Girmonsky, CEO and Founder of BlazeMeter. “The trust that large companies have in our technology around critical events speaks to the importance of performance overall. The inability to manage the volume directly equates to lost sales, making performance testing a critical investment for any company that needs to maintain peak performance at all times.”

    “Performance is our top priority,” said Lefkowitz. “Our customers have high expectations and we need to meet those expectations.”

    For more information on how MovieTickets.com works with BlazeMeter, visit https://www.blazemeter.com/case-study/movietickets?utm_source=BM&utm_medium=newswire&utm_campaign=MovieTickets. And for more information on how to improve site performance through continuous performance testing, visit https://blazemeter.com/.

    About BlazeMeter
    BlazeMeter ensures delivery of high-performance software by enabling DevOps teams to quickly and easily run open-source based performance tests against any mobile app, website or API at massive scale to validate performance at every stage of software delivery. The rapidly growing BlazeMeter community has over 100,000 developers and includes prominent global brands such as Adobe, Atlassian, Gap, NBC Universal, Pfizer and Walmart as customers. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, California with Research & Development in Tel Aviv, Israel.

    For more information, sign up for a free 14-day trial at www.blazemeter.com, visit our blog or find us on Twitter @BlazeMeter and on LinkedIn.

    About MovieTickets.com
    MovieTickets.com is the leader in advance movie ticketing with nearly 250 theater chains, representing over 28,000 screens in its group, offering moviegoers a quick and convenient way to purchase tickets online, via mobile devices and at 877-789-MOVIE. The company currently enables remote ticketing for consumers across 21 countries/territories including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. Fans can stay connected with MovieTickets.com through Facebook (facebook.com/MovieTicketscom), Twitter (twitter.com/movietickets) and YouTube (youtube.com/c/movietickets).

    Contacts

    Press Contact:
    PAN Communications
    Adam Novak, +1-617-502-4300
    blazemeter@pancomm.com

  • BlazeMeter Adds New Relic Insights to Drive Testing

    BlazeMeter Adds New Relic Insights to Drive Testing

    BlazeMeter  a performance / load testing as a self-service platform for mobile apps, websites, and APIs lets developers test mobile and API backend performance and view KPIs in a dashboard. BlazeMeter tools simplify testing, reducing the time to test while running many tests per day. Customers use BlazeMeter as a self-serve and on-demand service.

    “All they need is a web browser to generate massive loads from various geographical locations and view the test results in real-time,” says Alon Girmonsky, Founder & CEO, BlazeMeter. BlazeMeter lets developers simulate any size and configuration of device (Android, iOS, etc) and network (AT&T, Verizon, etc) user groups from any country using their app or browsing their website in order to test the backend.

    Developers can run simulations from minutes to hours in length, gaining real-time performance intel. Developers can test and fix the backend repeatedly until they are satisfied they have a version that is ready for release. Developers can then test continuously throughout the product lifecycle. Developers can script automated tests, test what-if scenarios, and examine user interactions with their backend technologies. BlazeMeter can scale simulations to satisfy very large customers who need to test for the kinds of loads that come with up to a million users.

    Irdeto Perfects Multiscreen With BlazeMeter

    Irdeto (http://www.irdeto.com/), a Naspers (http://www.naspers.com/) subsidiary and solutions provider for Pay-TV operators needed to performance test its Multiscreen mobile app, which enables TV viewing on a variety of devices and screens online. The Netherlands-based company had to examine broad simultaneous use of its app across many systems and complex, variegated usage patterns. Irdeto selected BlazeMeter to load test its Multiscreen technology backend while scaling user group size and changing test scenarios in real-time.

    Irdeto must enable a seamless, low latency UX across all devices while enabling audiences to access media content on-demand on new mobile devices as they appear in the marketplace. To do this, Irdeto partnered with BlazeMeter for additional support to test the app against “real world” scenarios, simulated by JMeter scripts (Apache JMeter http://jmeter.apache.org/). The JMeter scripts had to be created and entered into the system, leaving a lapse in an otherwise automated process. Tested scenarios included surfing, buying, and running premium content and interacting with Google Wallet (https://www.google.com/wallet/). Irdeto tested ramp up using JMeter’s Ultimate Thread Group (http://jmeter-plugins.org/wiki/UltimateThreadGroup/).

    Applying BlazeMeter and JMeter tools, Irdeto pinpointed and opened bottlenecks based on results from scaling tests to hundreds of thousands of users running a labyrinth of usage patterns. BlazeMeter enabled Irdeto to alter test schemes “on the fly” including adjusting weighting for one user activity over another. Irdeto was able to use BlazeMeter to drill down to less apparent bottlenecks and then resolve those as well.

    Speaking The Language of DevOps

    BlazeMeter is partnering with New Relic Insights (http://newrelic.com/insights) to add functionality to BlazeMeter’s testing and dashboard including the ability to query application data after testing using natural language questions, query data sets over time, audit test activity, and answer questions that relate to data coming from BlazeMeter and NewRelic combined. “New Relic Insights enables developers to create new dashboards that run in real-time. Insights can add five more dashboards to the 20 that BlazeMeter provides,” says Girmonsky.

    “BlazeMeter and New Relic Insights speak the language of DevOps, the language of continuous development and improvement by automating the development process, removing bugs, and reducing the time to project completion,” says Girmonsky. Developers can use these tools to follow performance trending, to see whether and where performance is improving or degrading, and why.

    The partnership helps operations, too. “The ops guy needs to see that all apps are up in production and not affecting each other or the overall user experience. These tools enable regression tests to do just that with every new software release,” says Girmonsky. The ops guy can use his New Relic Insights dashboard to build trends from continuous testing and improve response times as they discover issues using big data analytics.

    According to Girmonsky, enterprises should expect ROI in time, cost, and person-hours savings using these tools. “We didn’t conduct these specific kinds of analyses, however, prior to the availability of these tools enterprises had to export data into Excel and do the calculations that way. Now, they can run automated calculations in minutes,” says Girmonsky. According to Girmonsky’s estimates, BlazeMeter offers the enterprise the equivalent of building its own infrastructure to do testing, which would require a commitment of about two professionals for a full year to build that out.

    BlazeMeter alternatives include Flood.io (https://flood.io/), Load Impact (http://loadimpact.com), and HP LoadRunner (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/loadrunner-load-testing/). There are several other load testing platforms.

    [*Irdeto data compiled from Irdeto / BlazeMeter customer reference. New Relic was not a participant in that case study.]