In the GitLab 2018 Global Developer Report it says:

"As we look at 2018 and beyond, IT organizations that successfully adopt continuous improvement practices and seamless automation across their software development lifecycle will have happier, more collaborative, and well-functioning teams who are better positioned to meet their goals and objectives."

60% report automating more of the software development lifecycle as a top priority.

Other key findings from the survey:

• 61% agree that developers in their organization understand how their changes affect the performance of their application(s)
• 92% of respondents agree that open source tools are critical to software innovation
• 90% of managers, compared to 84% of developers, agree that practicing Continuous Integration (CI) alleviates blockers in the development process.

Testing came out on top when respondents were asked where in the development process they encountered the most delays: 

From the report: Manual testing and a change of plans mid-process (often by non-technical stakeholders) cause headaches for developers. As one respondent summarized, “We need to plan better and automate more,” a sentiment that was echoed across multiple responses.

We can see from the above that automating the testing process as part of the CI pipeline is a critical area of improvement for development and DevOps teams. Performance testing is a key component of the overall testing process. Performance testing as part of your Continuous Integration process allows developers test early in the development cycle. This makes finding and fixing performance issues faster and more efficient.

Join our webinar where we'll cover the basics of performance testing and how to incorporate it into your automation pipeline using the GitLab Continuous Integration tool. Learn how to execute performance tests with our open source load testing tool - k6 as part of your CI workflow.

If we want people to buy things from us, we need to make that process as easy as possible. Sound obvious? It should be. But - for our US readers - have you ever tried to buy a car? Was it easy, pleasant or simple? Based on our experience, the answer to that is a resounding “no.” You’d think that anyone running any business would want to make the buying process as easy as possible, since (obviousness alert) you need buyers in order to have business revenue.

WordPress is great because it’s flexible, extensible, and can be lightweight. Why “*can* be lightweight?” Because its flexibility and extensibility - its greatest strengths - can be WordPress’ greatest weakness.

In this webinar recording you'll learn:

• How to download k6 from GitHub
• How to stream k6 results to Insights for analysis
• High level overview of results analysis and performance alerts

If you're involved in software development and/or testing of websites, apps or APIs, don't miss this webinar recording on load testing with k6 and Load Impact Insights. k6 is our new, open source load generator, available for download on GitHub (https://github.com/loadimpact/k6).

We know that in most sectors, we have to gear up for a big Q4. As we shared a couple of months ago, for ecommerce, Q4 brings in about 30% more revenue than other quarters. And every year, that Q4 total increases by 20%. But what’s easy to overlook in the holiday season excitement is this: every single quarter grows 20% in ecommerce revenue year over year.

Comscore’s latest report lays out the facts. In 2017 over 2016, Q1 grew 20%, Q2 grew 18%, and Q3 grew 20%. In 2017, each quarter was over 100 billion USD.

Busy times here at Load Impact! Not one but two new releases of k6, our open source load testing tool, since last time you heard from us. We’re moving fast towards v1.0 release, thanks to our amazing community. We love you!

If you're involved in software development and/or testing of websites, apps or APIs, don't miss this webinar on load testing with k6 and Load Impact Insights. k6 is our new, open source load generator, available for download on GitHub (https://github.com/loadimpact/k6).

k6 has been built from the ground up for use by today’s DevOps teams throughout the development cycle. Developers can use k6 early in the development cycle to load test as part of their standard Continuous Integration process.

With k6, you can run tests locally, behind the firewall (available now), and in the cloud on Load Impact's cloud infrastructure (coming soon). Test scenario scripts are created using ES6 JavaScript. This makes it easy to create test scripts without having to learn a new scripting language.

Figure 1: Running a k6 test using JavaScript

Load Impact Insights allows you to store and analyze your k6 load test results. Built-in algorithms help automate results analysis to quickly uncover performance issues. You can start a free trial of Load Impact Insights by clicking here.

Figure 2: Load Impact Insights screen showing load test results

You may not be new to WordPress, but you may be new to testing your WordPress site. As your site grows, you may find your site running more slowly. Here’s how to get started load testing your WordPress site to uncover what is making it run slow.

It is with great excitement that we announce the launch and general availability of Load Impact Insights, the cloud based results storage, analysis and collaboration product for k6 load tests.

Ever since the first early beta release, some 10 months ago, the team has worked hard to iron out bugs and scale the streaming and analysis of k6 results data, and now we’re here! 🎉

We think you should test your code for not only function but performance. We’re not alone, and we loved this article we came across recently by Thiago Duarte. Called “7 Things I Learned That Made Me a Better Programmer,” Duarte tells some great stories and shares great tips.