The latest News and Information on Software Testing and related technologies.
With k6 Cloud, Grafana Labs is in the business of generating load — lots of load, distributed across a cluster of computers. So while our customers care about the systems they load, we care that our system can generate the load that they need and process the test metrics for them in an intuitive, explorable way.
Testing Kubernetes Ingress resources can be tricky, and can lead to frustration when bugs pop up in production that weren't caught during testing. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but with Ingress specifically, it often has to do with a misalignment between the data used in testing and the traffic generated in production. Tools like Postman can be a great way of generating traffic, but they have the drawback of being manually created. Not only is this unlikely to create all the needed variations for a single endpoint (different headers, different request bodies, etc.), it would be almost impossible to create all the needed variations, for all possible endpoints.
Grafana Faro and xk6-browser are both new tools within the Grafana Labs open source ecosystem, but the pairing is already showing a lot of potential in terms of frontend monitoring and performance testing. Faro, which was announced last November, includes a highly configurable SDK that instruments web apps to capture observability signals that can then be correlated with backend and infrastructure data.
Flaky tests are a problem that are found in almost every codebase. By definition, a flaky test is a test that both succeeds and fails without any changes to the code. For example, a flaky test may pass when someone runs it locally, but then fails on continuous integration (CI). Another example is that a flaky test may pass on CI, but when someone pushes a commit that hasn’t touched anything related to the flaky test, the test then fails.
Historically, software development and SRE have worked in silos with different cultural perspectives and priorities. The goal of DevOps is to establish common and complementary practices across software development and operations. Sadly, in some organizations true collaboration is rare and we still have a way to go to build effective DevOps partnerships.
