Load testing: what is interesting and what skills are needed?

Vasily Kudryavtsev, director of quality at RTLabs JSC and head of our course, were asked to talk about the prospects and challenges in the field of performance testing “Stress Testing”…

The most relevant area in QA today

In recent months, due to the current situation with the pandemic, more and more products and services are moving online, and the existing ones are rapidly expanding their audience. Traffic and load are increasing, and at the same time the relevance of load testing (HT).

Even novice specialists, but with the necessary set of skills, are hunted for several weeks. Moreover, the choice of projects is huge: banking, markets, delivery, education and streaming services, all kinds of online leisure, etc.

Can expect a salary 30-50% higher than in other areas of testing…

Each project in load testing is unique

The projects here are really diverse. It can be short and fast, when in one night you manage to write scripts, prepare scripts and test a high-load service. And there are long-term and large projects when you need to test a large distributed system.

In my practice, the most interesting project was a project of one well-known Bank, when we united a centralized network of regional banks, worked with huge iron clusters, which were thousands of servers. And it was really interesting and pleasant to watch when you prepare scripts and scripts for a long time, and then you get the result that is important and needed by the team. Well, in general, it is interesting to work with large pieces of iron.

Vasily Kudryavtsev

QA Load is the most diverse area where a specialist needs not only to deal with the code, but also to develop comprehensively…

But still, some technical skills are not enough. Employers are looking for those who have a general technical background, understand how to build processes correctly, know how to tell, show and prepare correct reporting.

How to become a load tester?

This direction has its own tools and scripts, but more importantly, the approach itself is different here. And if in general you mainly code in auto-testing, you will need to discover many new things at once in load testing.

We have collected the course “QA Load” from grains of materials, combining our experience in solving problems for various companies. 70% of the program contains practice – and this is what distinguishes it from other educational projects. We do not have superficial topics, each is studied in depth, with an analysis of cases and the opportunity to try a tool, to train a skill.

For example, in our first introductory module even experienced load testers will probably adopt a couple of featuresthat have not been used before. You will find out what the “load” is for, what stages it consists of. Get a demonstration and practice of preparing a load testing profile, which is one of the important parts of preparing for a project. You will analyze in detail what the methodology is for and what reporting is. Find out what types of reporting are available and what is important to discuss with your team.

In the second module, you will learn 4 basic load testing tools: Performance center, Jmeter, Gatling, k6.io. Although there are slightly more of them on the market, after surveys we identified the ones that are used everywhere and this set should be enough to solve 90% of the “load”. So that these tools can be immediately integrated into DevOps processes, there is a separate lesson on automating load testing using Jenkins, embedding using CI / CD. We’ll also talk separately about Grafana and InfluxDB in order to combine this part of monitoring with your tests.

Third block of the course dedicated to related load taskswhere you learn to design basic stubs and emulators, dive into the design of databases, application servers, and queues. All this constitutes a significant part of the work of a stress testing specialist. The last lesson in the module is most useful for experienced professionals. Here we will evaluate our load testing process in terms of quality and analyze what regression load testing is specifically for releases in your product teams.

During your studies, you will have intensive work and 8 homework: consolidate the material covered, try each tool, write scripts, test, etc. There will be tasks for developing an HT profile, setting up logging and conducting regression testing for a website. For those who want to get even more skills and benefits, there are items with an asterisk in the tasks. You will train on real systems, servers, websites. The training stands will be provided by the AdvancedHosting course partner.

The final part of the program is design work that can be done for your work or our training system. You will go through a full testing cycle and apply all the skills learned during the training. If you do not have your own project, we will select an individual service, so there will be no two identical works. Each student will be able to see what problems his fellow students have encountered, will be able to learn from their experience and solutions.

Completing homework and the project will give you enough experience to qualify for the position of an independent stress testing specialist after the course.

We already had such that, without recommending one of the students of the first launch, they made an offer before the end of the training. Many change jobs before completing the course. the demand for loaders is very high.

Vasily Kudryavtsev

Who needs load testing skills?

Our course is designed for professionals who are already versed in testing. To successfully master the program, you need to have a programming base in one of the languages ​​- during the training you will come across SQL, Java, C, Scala, there is also a lot of work in Linux, so you need to know basic things: how to connect to the console, find a file, etc. etc.

Functional testers and automation engineers a little programming experience and basic knowledge will be enough, which will allow you to realize yourself in the most interesting area of ​​testing.

Specialists who are already doing load testing, will be able to systematize knowledge, learn something new for themselves, learn a new tool, or understand what is currently not taken into account in their current load testing processes.

The course will also be useful developers and technical specialists. support and software… For those who work in a product team and understand that the current services are reaching loads that are worth checking. Or in the case when a project is experiencing problems with the performance of its systems, and there is a goal to really build NT processes correctly. The knowledge gained will allow us to develop a set of load testing tools and monitor on a regular basis that everything is fine with the systems.

In the new stream “QA Load” classes will begin October 29 and will last 4 months… If the direction interests you, take the entrance test and join the groupwhile there are places. We are waiting for you and see you at OTUS!