Updated April 5, 2023
Introduction to Selenium Load Testing
Have you ever come across the proverb “Time is money”? I feel that products in load testing or maybe for the fact, any other performance testing truly lives this proverb. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you tend to answer a bit late to the questions you have been asked? Don’t you think people will stop coming to you with questions? The same happens for websites. If the websites respond a little later, people tend to get distracted and if that is the source that generates money for you, then it’s a sin to put something which has not been tested for performance and speed. Now, this is where Selenium load testing will help you cure the bottlenecks to have an optimized and speedy website to help you generate even greater revenue!
How Load Testing is done by Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source tool for testing via automated functional testing and like all other testing tools, Selenium is also even used for load testing, which is a part of performance testing and not functional testing, as it propagates the reuse of functional tests which are already existing and also run them having concurrent users virtually. Now before we deep dive into Selenium let us get a hang of what eventually load testing means and some relevance to the real-life load testing so that we can appreciate the job of Selenium even more!
Load testing is a test of functionality that ensures that the software won’t under-perform under a given set of circumstances (as per the circumstances listed during planning) and allow the program to run smoothly under real-life conditions with “loads” onto it. Now the reason we have categorized load testing to be performance testing and non-functionality testing is that the behavior of the program is not a functional aspect of itself. It is more to do with how the program “performs” under the given set of conditions. Now there are certain goals that a load testing software will take into account during their load testing process (Selenium is no exception) and they are:
- Identify the response time of the transactions.
- System performance under various levels of load.
- Database performance under various load levels.
- Interpreting the network delay, which is inevitable, between the client and the server.
- Issues in software design
- Limitations in hardware where the program is launched or to which the program interacts.
Now that we know the objectives which need to be fulfilled by the load testing we can easily curate the steps for performing the load testing process which is a standardized step for any selenium testing, whilst some improvisations are important to have a better testing outcome.
- Creation of a dedicated load testing environment: This is to make sure that the code developed, and unit tested in a different environment is environment agnostic and make sure that no dependency on the local variables of the environment is affecting the performance. This testing environment also makes sure that we have a production-like environment with possibilities of any scenario which might happen in real life.
- Creation of browser configuration: In this step, the user would be able to configure the browser bases settings so as to replicate the real-life scenario. For example, one might be able to configure the HTTP protocol to simulate an HTTP request on the Chrome browser in this step.
- Test case scenarios upload: In this step the user would be able to upload the test case scenarios created for testing the performance of the software under a specified load. These case scenarios make sure that we have enough cases to identify all the bottlenecks of the program where there is a chance of improvement of performance or might be the weakest link of failure of the program.
- Load testing transaction to be determined for the application: In this step, the user would be doing a number of steps, like preparing data for each transaction. These data should be from real-world occurrences. Then one would need to put in a predicted number of users who would be accessing the system. Then one would need to simulate the connection lines speed as all the users might not have access to a high-speed connection. Next is to determine the different browser one would need the compatibility of the program to be with along with the OS from which users in real-world might use. All of these in a coherence determination will lead to successful load testing! One more thing is adding specific relevant logs at specific “stop points” to determine intermediately if everything is running as per want.
- Execution and monitoring of test scenario: Once the tests have completed execution, the various metric is collected through already set up instances during the running of the test scenario and then analyzed thoroughly.
- Recommendations: Once the results are analyzed extensively, the team puts in a set of recommendations that might be possible bottlenecks or maybe an area of improvement of performance.
- Fine-tune of the system: On the basis of recommendations made in the earlier steps, necessary actions are taken for fine-tuning the system so that all the bottlenecks are removed, and the system is optimized to the fullest.
- Re-testing: Once the fine-tuning is done all the above steps are followed again and incase necessary, another few levels of testing are done before finally releasing it into production.
Importance of Load Testing by Selenium
In the steps of Selenium load testing, we are able to identify a lot of advantages in terms of the testing procedure and its outcomes. The reason for the popularity of Selenium is because:
- It not only allows load testing but also provides a suite of other testing frameworks within the same hood.
- It identifies the performance bottlenecks before releasing them into the production environment.
- It helps in reducing the cost of failure, which might be a big overhead, once the system is released and in turn minimizes the risk of having downtime of the system.
- BrowserMob tool as a load testing in Selenium helps you to track performance statistics for web applications.
- One might also exploit the JMeter addon for Selenium to have even other seamless features.
Conclusion
Finally, in conclusion, we have had a deep understanding of what Selenium is capable of from a load testing perspective and as we say all in this world is not perfect, there are some drawbacks from Selenium that should be focussed on when we are choosing software for load testing. But, in a nutshell, Selenium is a great tool for all possible cases in real life for load testing!
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