Software testing is important enough to have its own phase in the software development life cycle (SDLC). The software testing life cycle (STLC) is a step-by-step process that improves the quality of software by applying rigorous planning and analysis to the testing process. Testing is a development tool that adds value to your team’s applications. Embracing testing as a vital component of software development can save you and your team a lot of time debugging and fixing errors in the future.

Postman is a great tool for API testing during development. It’s GUI is simple to learn and ubiquitous. However, manually writing test cases for local development gets tedious fast if you have a lot of endpoints. Meticulously entering every detail for every use case takes forever. Also, if you get one HTTP Header or parameter wrong, it can take hours to diagnose. And even when it’s done, the API tests are almost immediately out of date because the API contract changes.

The software testing data provided by CI/CD tools is valuable, but it is not always comprehensive enough to give managers the insights they need to make improvements. To make effective business decisions, managers need visibility into the entire testing process, in a way that will help them understand what needs to be done and how.

Elastic Enterprise Search is a product that uses the power of Elasticsearch over datasets — so that data will always be accessible, no matter its location. Enterprise Search leverages Kibana and Elasticsearch to let you index all your data. Enterprise Search is composed of two distinct sets of features: App Search and Workplace Search. App Search provides APIs and dashboard controls for building powerful search experiences.

Will your software perform well during peak hours? Can it handle the load during sales periods? Is your infrastructure valid if you double your sales by the end of the year? These are just some of the questions that scalability testing can help you answer. Scalability testing evaluates the activity level of your application by upscaling and downscaling the number of users.

The reliability of a website affects its earning potential, as every second in the digital world counts. According to a study by BCG and Ryte, every second of loading speed costs from $3,000 to $9,000, depending on the eCommerce industry. That shows that your website has to perform optimally all year round. It's the only way to avoid losing money. Aside from outstanding performance, you need to work on your website's design. Certain tools help you improve it to get more conversions.

One of the most important phrases of DevOps practices is “Test early, test often.” It’s crucial to perform functional testing early with unit tests and integration tests. But it’s equally important to perform non-functional testing. That means you should have performance tests. As markets become more saturated with each passing day, you no longer have the luxury to postpone performance testing until all features are developed.

Performance testing measures how well systems perform when subjected to various workloads. The key qualities being tested are stability and responsiveness. Performance testing shows the robustness and reliability of systems in general, along with the specific potential breaking points. In this tutorial, you will use k6 to do load testing on a simple API hosted on the Heroku platform. Then you will learn how to interpret the results obtained from the tests.