Master Performance Testing with Neotys

Software teams developing web and mobile applications often struggle to provide adequate load and performance testing.  Without adequate testing, apps freeze, user experiences suffer and it can be hard to find tools that get the job done within the timeframe of a typical Agile iteration. Using Neotys’ next-generation load and performance testing solution, NeoLoad, testers and developers can improve the quality, reliability and speed of their web and mobile applications in less time and with unmatched realism.

“Realism is everything in testing. If you built your app with modern web technologies and you’re using traditional testing tools, you’re probably compromising your scenario designs by employing ‘workarounds’ that ultimately lead to suboptimal tests,” said Jonathan Bracken, VP of Marketing at Neotys. Creating a realistic test is difficult. Test designs need to reflect complex user behavior, and there’s also the challenge of replicating the production infrastructure, all of the devices, and all of the device configurations. To compensate, testing teams often take shortcuts that either underestimate the scope of a use case or produce results they can’t trust.

“If you’re testing a complex ecommerce site and all you’re doing is seeing if you can place an item in a shopping cart, you’re doing yourself a disservice because you failed to consider variables such as the full range of product categories, the products within them, and the complex dependencies,” said Bracken. “We take care of all of that automatically, making it easy to create extremely realistic tests.”

Ensure Reliable Mobile User Experiences
Mobile testing adds a layer of complexity with new devices hitting the market and the evolution of the mobile network infrastructure. To ensure acceptable user experiences, testers must consider the different screen sizes and hardware capabilities of the devices as well as network conditions including bandwidth, latency, and packet loss.

NeoLoad is the industry’s first complete mobile performance testing solution. It provides realistic device simulation and network emulation so testers can account for all users and devices over any connection speed with varying latency, bandwidth and packet loss values. It also records test cases from any mobile device. In addition, NeoLoad integrates with real device testing tools such as Perfecto Mobile’s MobileCloud to provide important device-side metrics including rendering time, memory consumption, and battery usage to capture the full end user experience under load.

“In addition to considering all of the variables and complex application behaviors that would impact a web application, when testing mobile apps you also have to consider device performance and network conditions,” said Bracken. “If you’re not emulating the mobile network and you’re not simulating the devices you can’t trust the results.”

Neotys’ cloud platform pulls sites from six different vendors and 22 locations around the world into a single portal so users can provision the infrastructure they need within a few minutes. NeoLoad’s integrated agent-less monitoring capability provides actionable insights about errors that occurred and what caused them.

“You get the details you need so you can quickly get to root cause,” said Bracken. “Our latest release, Neoload 5.0, includes an open API so you can import data from external sources and correlate it with NeoLoad results in real time. You can also kick off other tools and events to create a powerful and automated testing hub.”

Improve Agile Testing
Agile development is at odds with complex hand-coded test scripting. As release cycles continue to shrink, testers must look for ways to speed results without sacrificing quality.
With NeoLoad, testing teams can execute realistic load and performance tests faster and with greater ease than ever before. Its GUI based drag-and-drop functionality allows testers to simulate highly complex behaviors, customize test designs without writing code, and rapidly redesign tests when applications change.

“When an app changes, often the same test design isn’t going to work,” said Bracken. “Testers need to know when an application has changed so they can make the necessary changes to their load tests. That way, when Jenkins (or other CI tool) kicks off the test, it’s going to work correctly.”

NeoLoad integrates with continuous integration servers to enable automated load and performance testing. It also provides the pass/fail SLA results of those tests, delivering an instant view of an app’s performance for each new build. Using Neotys Team Server, users can collaborate on test designs, easily share test results, and split a pool of virtual users to test multiple applications concurrently. Neotys also offers a free version of NeoLoad that developers can use to understand how a feature or a piece of functionality performs relative to the last version.

In short, NeoLoad is improving the economics, efficiency, and effectiveness of load and performance testing. For example, The Sporting Index was able to run 5x more tests in the same time period simply by replacing a legacy tool with NeoLoad. H&R Block tested 1.5x more apps without increasing its staff while reducing production performance issues by 90 percent.

Learn more at www.neotys.com.