How To Use Jenkins for Continuous Load and Mobile Testing with SOASTA & CloudBees

Editor's Notes

1. So, based on the poll results…. (there is a mix of users that test in development, staging, and production environment) … In today’s webinar, we will be focusing on performance testing as a continuous process, testing across your software product lifecycle - devops and perf eng is a team effort! Load testing has evolved along with continuous delivery and now requires that developers eliminate performance issues on their desktop while test and operations teams validate from the test lab to live production systems. Your test platform must be adaptable and accessible testing behind and beyond firewalls.  Generally speaking, traditionally, testing has begun at the component level and works outward toward the integration of the entire system. At each point of this process, there are different techniques to testing; however, with the market being so competitive and your users/customers expecting so much out of your product, the time to get this important function done may be compromised. Unfortunately, testing is often the bottleneck that causes teams to wait as manual testing completes or redundant testing tasks are executed by siloed test teams. The goal is not to introduce delays but instead to continually test throughout the lifecycle.
2. While enabling more testing at all stages of the product lifecycle, we want to eliminate delays and compress the time to release. This approach requires communication and collaboration between various stakeholders - dev folks, QA team, the product owner and the Ops team. Whether your web app is for external or internal users, the performance of the app is critical – they want a fast and responsive site to get their job done. Most of us have been through this … but do we have the patience to sit and watch the spinning circle and see the pages render slowly down the browser? Perceived wait time can causes positive or negative reactions to your product. In an agile approach, automation and continuous testing compress time. Developers test in short iterations on their local machines and conduct unit tests. A big change we see in more agile shops using SOASTA is that the Dev team is empowered to build automated functional and performance tests on their code. Performance has traditionally been the domain of specialized teams, and still is, but if Developers eliminate code-level performance bugs, the Perf Team can build better and more complex tests to isolate issues outside of the code. Test and Ops team can then focus on tests with different objectives behind existing firewalls … The ops team can also do the same approach, working in conjunction with the developers. But the difference here is that the testing gets expanded focusing on areas of the code that involve your infrastructure – database, APIs / web services, smoke tests, custom code, critical single page apps. This bottom-up testing scenario gives tests low level components combined in clusters to validate the performance of a specific software function with increasingly complex and user-focused testing as time goes on.
3. Work very closely with the community – lead sponsor of Jenkins User Conferences Focus is the plugin architecture
4. High availability, scalability
5. Jenkins is emerging as the hub of continuous delivery
6. Now let’s dig a little deeper into SOASTA Solutions. Running on our single platform, each set of capabilities are packaged to provide a complete set of quality tools for your teams to meet the needs of an increasingly continuous delivery cycle.