The paradoxical state of performance testing

Ever wondered why performance testing feels so “distant” in our day-to-day work in software development? Why companies often have a performance testing specialist, or performance tests that depend on frameworks and languages that engineers don’t use daily. Did you also experience that never ending vicious cycle of trying to performance test your application but failing to do so because the rest of the landscape is not playing along nicely?

After years of asking these questions and running into issues while performance testing, we decide to stop and rethink how we performance test. We wanted to make performance testing easy to implement and execute, reliable and repeatable. Sounds like many of the characteristics of functional tests don’t you think? After a lot of thinking and coding, we created a setup that allows us exactly that. Performance test our applications with tools we use daily. A setup that allows us to “control the landscape” and by doing so make our performance tests reliable and repeatable.