A few years ago, I was meeting with venture capitalists and private equity firms about the future of k6, the open source performance testing tool that we created in 2016 and open sourced in 2017. After talking about the k6 product mission — to give modern engineering teams better tools to build reliable applications — one investor challenged us to create an even bigger vision for the company: What if we acquired a company to broaden the k6 story?

Testing is a vital part of the software development lifecycle. It plays an important role in the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, enabling developers to release dependable, resilient, and secure software consistently. There are many types of testing and testing methodologies: end-to-end testing, dynamic testing, integration testing, and others. This article focuses on component testing and unit testing.

Jest is a JavaScript-based testing framework that lets you test both front-end and back-end applications. Jest is great for validation because it comes bundled with tools that make writing tests more manageable. While Jest is most often used for simple API testing scenarios and assertions, it can also be used for testing complex data structures. In this tutorial, we will go through how to use Jest to test nested API responses and hopefully have fun in the process.

Reliability is a critical concern for software delivery teams. Every second of lackluster performance or service interruption comes with high costs. The consequences can extend beyond just monetary expenses and have a huge impact on a company’s reputation. In a survey conducted in 2022, participants reported that over 60% of digital infrastructure failures resulted in losses of $100,000 or more.

Speedscale creates load tests from recorded traffic so generating load is pretty core to what we do. As a brief overview, we record traffic from your service in one environment and replay it in another, optionally increasing load several fold. During a replay the Speedscale load generator makes requests against the system under test (SUT), with the responses from external dependencies like APIs or a payment processor optionally mocked out for consistency. Your service is the SUT here.

When you maintain an internal or public-facing API, the API documentation is an important component of the overall user/developer experience. One of the industry standards for such documentation is the OpenAPI specification. With an OpenAPI specification, you define a contract that specifies how your API should behave, but nothing stops the parties involved from breaking such a contract (e.g., using a wrong implementation or invalid input).

In this article, you’ll be introduced to two tools: Speedscale and NeoLoad. Both of these tools offer you a way to load test your applications. This post will compare their ease of setup, development experience, fit within a modern infrastructure, and integration into CI/CD. Load testing is not a new concept in any way: the term was common even before Google Trends started recording data in 2004.

One of the leading frameworks in the JavaScript community, Vue.js is a progressive framework for building reusable components for the web user interface. Its intuitive API and robust flexibility for handling front-end logic are just two of the reasons that Vue has been adopted by developers worldwide. In this tutorial, I will lead you through building a simple listing application that shows the names and roles of users. I will show you how to write tests for the application.