Load Testing with Serenity BDD and Cucumber

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to reuse existing tests written with Serenity BDD and Cucumber for load testing.

Get Step SaaS for free to follow this tutorial

Illustration for Load Testing with Cypress

Prerequisites

Access to a Step cluster: Get started quickly by setting up a free SaaS cluster in the Step Portal, or, if preferred, follow the Installation page to configure your own on-premise cluster.
Maven: Follow the official Maven documentation to install Maven

Test scenario

For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll simulate 10 parallel users visiting our demo online store. The typical visit that we’ll simulate consists of the following actions: navigate to the online store, search for a product, and open the product details.

Checkout the sample

Clone the Sample project from GitHub:

  git clone https://github.com/exense/step-samples

Navigate to the sample directory:

  cd step-samples/automation-packages/load-testing-serenity/

Project structure

The project follows a standard Maven structure.

Project descriptor

At the root of the folder, you’ll find the project descriptor pom.xml which contains following high-level dependencies:

Serenity BDD
Cucumber
Step

The pom.xml also contains the declaration and configuration of the Step Maven plugin which delegates the execution of the test to Step during the verify phase.

Define the URL of your Step cluster and your API key (refer to Generate an API Key) in following section:

  <properties>
    ...
    <step.url>https://your-step-cluster.stepcloud.ch/</step.url>
    <step.auth-token>Your API key</step.auth-token>
    <step.step-project-name>Common</step.step-project-name>
</properties>

Load test descriptor

The main file of the project is located in src/main/resources/automation-package.yaml. It corresponds to the Automation Package descriptor of Step, which describes the load test scenario as YAML:

  schemaVersion: 1.0.0
name: "load-testing-serenity"
plans:
  - name: "Demo Serenity Load Test"
    root:
      threadGroup:
        # Run the sequence with 10 VUs
        users: 10
        # Perform 1000 iterations per user
        iterations: 1000
        children:
          # Call the keyword executeAllFeatures defined in the class SerenityKeywords
          - callKeyword:
              keyword: "executeAllFeatures"

Serenity test

The automation package references the executeAllFeatures keyword, defined in the SerenityKeywords Java class, which invokes the standard JUnit test defined in SerenityTestRunner.java.

  @RunWith(CucumberWithSerenity.class)
@CucumberOptions(
		plugin = {"html:reports/cucumber-html-report.html",
				"json:reports/cucumber.json"}
		,features= {"classpath:features"}
		,glue = {"step.examples.serenity.stepdefinition"}
		,monochrome = true
		)
public class SerenityTestRunner {

}

Execute locally

Optionally, you can run the test locally:

  mvn clean compile test

Note: Running this will execute the entire automation package as defined in automation-package.yaml, launching all virtual users in parallel on your local machine. Depending on your machine’s capacity, you may want to adjust the load test parameters before executing the test.

Execute in Step

To trigger the remote execution in Step, run the following maven command:

mvn verify -DskipTests

The test is executed in Step according to the plan specified in automation-package.yaml. The maven project is configured to wait for the execution to complete.

The command outputs a direct link to the execution report in Step:

  [INFO] Execution(s) started in Step:
[INFO] - 'Demo Serenity Load Test' (https://your-step-cluster.stepcloud.ch/#/executions/6708c4ecf7255b00b3a39220)
[INFO] Waiting for execution(s) to complete...

Analyze the result

Open the execution report in Step by clicking the direct link printed by the command above.

In the Performance tab, you can explore detailed performance metrics:

Performance view of the execution report

There you’ll find all metrics related to the Cucumber steps.

Review the transaction statistics

At the bottom of the Performance view, you’ll find an aggregation of performance metrics for the selected time frame:

Performance summary of the execution report

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