In software development, load testing plays a critical role in ensuring that applications perform optimally under any imaginable load condition. To do this, developers subject applications to several types of load tests, including scalability, spike, endurance, and stress testing. The ultimate goal of these performance tests is to pinpoint potential bottlenecks and ensure the reliability of the overall system where the software application runs before reaching production.

The benefits of API mocking extend beyond just speeding up development. It enables developers to work independently of external APIs, eliminating delays caused by dependencies that may be out of their control. This independence is crucial for maintaining workflow efficiency, especially in complex projects involving multiple APIs. API mocking is invaluable for testing edge cases and error scenarios that might be difficult to reproduce with a live API.

As part of our recent failure testing project, we ran into an interesting failure mode involving the OpenTelemetry SDK for Go. In this post, we’ll show you why our apps stopped sending telemetry for over 15 minutes and how we enabled keepalives to prevent this kind of failure from happening in the future.

You probably know that Microsoft’s Playwright is a solid tool for end-to-end testing, enabling you to control headless browsers and check essential user flows. But did you know that you can also use Playwright for API testing? If you didn’t, then this guide is for you. In this post, we’ll explore how Playwright can be used to test a GraphQL API (but don’t worry if you’re using REST; Playwright can handle any HTTP-based API).

You can write Playwright end-to-end testing code using JavaScript or TypeScript. Which one should you choose? When I started writing my first automated browser tests, I went with JavaScript because I couldn't be bothered with the type wrangling. I just wanted to get something off the ground quickly. YOLO, right? Today, though, there are two reasons why I last wrote a JavaScript-first Playwright test a very long time ago.

Ephemeral environments transform software development by providing temporary, isolated spaces for testing and deploying microservices without affecting production. Given its robust orchestration capabilities, Kubernetes excels at creating these temporary environments, allowing teams to efficiently manage and scale containerized applications. By integrating tools like Helm and Kustomize, developers can maintain a codified version of their app and its dependencies.

About every two months, the Grafana k6 team releases a new version of the open source load testing tool to deliver new features and further enhance the user experience. In case you missed them, here’s a recap of recent k6 releases and some of the exciting updates they brought to our user base. Many of the features highlighted in this post relate to new web APIs that the community has been asking for, and that are widely used by JavaScript developers.