Performance testing is an integral part of your software delivery process. It helps organizations deliver higher quality software in less time while reducing development costs. The goal is to test performance early and often as part of the development effort, testing functionality and performance within the same sprint, and doing API Load Testing or components based. That’s because the longer you wait to conduct performance tests, the costlier it will be to incorporate changes.
Test with a Shift Left Approach
With “Shift Left,” the focus pivots toward testing as early as possible during the SDLC (specifically, integration testing). The effort associated as you pull integration testing forward will result in the identification of issues sooner – bugs you will be able to address and fix immediately. In order to achieve the full return on your investment into shift left testing, it needs to be easier for the whole team to deliver on this premise – DevOps is the way to make this happen using automation and service virtualization.
In order to keep up with today’s rapid pace of continuous this and that, the performance engineer is challenged to test faster while continuing to maintain application performance under load during every step of the test cycle. This means that they are changing what is being tested throughout the SDLC, and doing so via new testing approaches like API Load Testing, Microservices, and components.
See Our Resource Content About API Load Testing
In partnership with TechWell, we recently delivered a webinar focused on the idea of using shifting left efforts as spur to drive teams toward adoption of earlier performance testing through implementation of these new testing tactics: “Shifting Left: The Top 5 Reasons to Test APIs and Components Early.”
For additional context behind the importance of API performance tests, Microservices, and component testing, as well as the increasing value of the performance engineer’s role, see our latest blog series – how speed and quality can each be attained in your performance testing.