Be sure to check out this Test Talk podcast hosted by Joe Colantonio. Joe speaks with Robin Gustafsson, CTO of Load Impact, about lowering the barriers for performance testing, to make it much easier for developers to test early in the development cycle. Robin talks about k6, the open source load testing tool that was built to be "developer centric."
What does it mean to be "Developer Centric?"
With the DevOps movement comes the need for developers to be more actively involved in software performance testing. This means having the ability to run small tests as part of your daily build process. k6 has a number of features that support this developer use model:
- Test scripts are written in ES6 JavaScript, a very familiar and powerful scripting language (See a sample k6 test script here)
- "Tests as code" so that they can be tracked in your version control system (VCS)
- Test scripts can be modularized, so they can be shared across teams-- another requirement of a DevOps methodology
- k6 is command line driven
- k6 was built to make it easy to transition from the small, local testing stage to the automation stage; it fits natively into your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline
Learn more about k6 and performance testing in the podcast. Note that Load Impact Cloud Execution, mentioned in the podcast, is now in production. Thanks Joe, for hosting this session!