Benefits of browser-based load-testing with step

Over the past few years, many tools have sprung out trying to address the requirements of Load-testing. They have all aimed at making the life of testers easier and giving the business the necessary insights on the performance of their code. Of the many load-testing offerings, Browser-based Load-testing solutions have picked up pace in the recent past.

In this short guide, we will learn to understand browser-based load-testing and its benefits. We will then explore step, a tool that helps testers perform load-testing on browsers seamlessly.

Overview of Load-testing

In simple terms, load-testing measures the performance and stability of an application under an expected load.

Consider a situation where there is a flurry of concurrent HTTP-requests to a web application at the same time. Most web applications struggle with issues like timeouts and denial of service attacks as they are either not scalable thus not built to handle high loads. There have been incidents where companies were not aware of how their app behaves under high loads. This has proven to be one of the main reasons for customer dissatisfaction.

It is therefore necessary to make sure an application is ready to handle an increase in traffic demand, and that’s where load-testing proves to be useful.

Browser-based Load-testing

Traditionally, load-testing was performed at protocol level and not on browsers. Due to this, it was difficult to determine the difference in performance between different versions of different browsers. Therefore, testing at protocol level did not suffice for cross browser compatibility and results were inaccurate. Also, browsers today follow different approaches to perform caching, SSL Encryption to name a few. This shortcoming nurtured the development of browser-based load-testing techniques, that take all these parameters into account and also consider browser response times.

Benefits of Browser-based Load-testing

Browser-based load tests are gaining wide popularity in the field of software testing due to their numerous benefits. Here are some of the advantages of browser-based load-testing:

Browser-based load-testing makes scripting much easier as we do not have to reverse engineer the requests made at protocol level. It therefore makes the development of the test automation suite faster and more robust to changes.
The simulation relies on real browser, thus making it less error-prone.
Inclusion of response times based on real user behavior helps gather more accurate measurements.
The ability to execute business workflows on multiple browsers helps determine and suggest to customers a suitable browser to get the best experience with the web application.

step and Browser-based Load-testing

step is a unified automation platform allowing to easily manage artifacts within different workflows. It helps testers record and develop scripts with unprecedented flexibility and zero redundancy.

step Offerings:

step makes the work of test automation experts simple by offering a platform to work on the following set of automation requirements:

Figure 1: Benefits of using step to empower automation processes

Load-testing is tricky!

For an organization, managing the expected load on a system requires a good understanding of the behavior of the system under varying load. Thus, companies resort to load and performance testing. Many times, choosing the right tool or integrating one tool with another turns out to be cumbersome. The need for a unified platform which handles all the underlying complexities and provides a clean and simple environment to perform test automation looms large.

step to the rescue

step helps to put in place an effective load and performance testing setup and provides testers with valuable insights through a well-organized dashboard. Here is how step helps with various aspects of load-testing.

Test Automation scripting often involves 1000s of lines of code. A small misconfiguration can prove to be troublesome to resolve. If testers are given a platform to execute multiple load test scenarios accurately in one single tool, wouldn’t that be great? That’s where step comes into picture. It provides semantics for load-testing and scheduling in a single tool. Get a sample code handy from github, and execute load tests on real browsers by creating a plan, adding keywords and threads to the plan as explained in the Load-testing with Selenium tutorial. Figure 2: Easily manage semantics and scheduling for load-testing with step
When creating load-tests, it is important that the web applications behavior is tested under all levels of load. Step offers a horizontally scalable grid of agents which can execute thousands of concurrent sessions, which can be monitored in dashboard. Elastic scalability with step is easy as any number of agents can join and leave the automation grid at any point in time even while a test is running. Figure 3: Agent overview in the step grid
The ability to visualize the results of the tests helps put across a better picture on how the application is behaving. Step offers a central management application with real time monitoring, analytics, and dashboards with which load test performance results can be viewed in one place. Figure 4: The step dashboard helps monitoring relevant metrics
Step offers integrations with multiple testing tools, including two of the best-known automation testing frameworks Selenium and Cypress. It also allows for code blocks to be reused, thus making development of test suites simpler and faster.

Follow along the below guides to find more:

Last but not least, another important aspect is the total cost of ownership (TOC) and the pricing incurred for setup.

Pricing

Pricing is one major factor that drives clients to decide which product to go ahead with as most companies work on a limited budget. In the world of automation testing, it is challenging to maintain: large-scale automation, test code maintenance, infrastructure allocation, tooling and many more. It is thus important to consider these aspects and decide on the TCO to make it best available to the end-users. To provide solutions for all of this, step comes into play.

Since the TCO of an on-premise cluster is much more complex to price, exense’s SaaS prices will be used as a reference. The calculation will be based on the hypothesis of a mid-sized cluster featuring 100 concurrent browser instances. Assuming an average transaction duration of 800 ms, a cluster of this size would support the simulation of around 7’500 interactions per minute (or 125 TpS), which would suffice for many projects.

In the SaaS offer provided by exense, activating such a cluster would cost $21 per hour. To satisfy all data safety requirements, exense guarantees that any data managed in the cloud physically stays within Switzerland. For clients who prefer to run clusters on-premise, it would happen at a higher TCO.

Conclusion

In this article we have understood the concept of load-testing and how browser-based load-testing helps reap better and meaningful results. We have also understood in brief how step addresses the requirements and issues of browser-based load-testing. Exense has been constantly working to add additional features into step and give customers the best tool possible. Do check out the various subscription options of step and the TCO of browser automation to execute your test cases on the cloud at a much faster pace and ease.