Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Performance testing is an essential component of building fast and reliable web services. Until recently, this testing typically happened later in the development process and was often performed by a separate team or even a third party. But speed is the competitive advantage for companies, and prioritizing testing during the development process can speed time to market for new applications.

While there is a lot of focus on the three pillars of observability to provide insight into application performance in production, load testing is the other side of the observability story. By using the open source load testing tool k6 — which Grafana Labs acquired earlier this year — developers can simulate real-world traffic to test the reliability and performance of software changes and new features, not to mention flag performance issues before impacting end users.

NestJS is fast becoming the de facto framework for NodeJS projects. Unlike older frameworks, NestJS was built with TypeScript, which has become commonplace in the JavaScript community. Frameworks like NestJS seem to be preferred by teams that adopt TypeScript. NestJS supports building APIs in REST and GraphQL. The goal of this tutorial is to show how you can add unit and integration tests to a NestJS GraphQL project and automate the testing process with CircleCI.

Is it possible to use just one tool to test everything? Although it may sound like a developer’s daydream, it is almost possible with Cypress, a JavaScript frontend testing framework. Cypress is built specifically for JavaScript frontend developers, and they can use it to start writing tests quickly without needing to add third-party dependencies or packages. This is a benefit missing from other tools like Selenium. In this tutorial, I will guide you through using Cypress to test an API.

The CircleCI Insights dashboard was designed to help you improve your delivery efficiency. We launched the dashboard a year ago to provide teams with actionable data for optimizing your pipelines. Since then, we’ve been listening to your feedback. By far, the most requested functionality is the ability to gain further visibility into test performance.

At Speedscale, we are on the cutting edge of defining autonomous testing for the cloud era. However, we aren’t the only company trying to solve this problem and we enjoy learning from every perspective. That’s why Facebook’s recent blog article about autonomous testing caught my eye. They’ve built a sophisticated autonomous test system that introduces many of the same techniques we utilize.

For the past five years, CircleCI has hired third-party penetration testing firms that hammer our product releases or infrastructure at minimum every 90 days. To date, we’ve done more than 25 of these. Sometimes they cover new product features and other times they cover infrastructure.

Testing in isolation is known to be expensive. It’s time-consuming to execute thoroughly, and it typically requires a testing environment — sometimes multiple testing environments. That said, testing in isolation is undeniably effective.

If you work anywhere near the field of software development, you’ve likely already heard that you should always write code that is well-tested. Everyone wants to have well-tested code and for a good reason! Testing ensures our code is working as intended and protects against regression. Thoroughly testing code helps teams confidently ship software faster and with fewer issues.