The secrets to an effective DevOps team are communication and collaboration. This is especially true in load testing.
The #1 best practice we recommend with your regular load testing is to set pass/fail triggers with your automated build processes. (We’ve talked about that elsewhere.) As part of those triggers, failure notifications should be set up in a shared communications channel.
Communicate load test results
To communicate those load test results, we use LoadImpact + CircleCI’s ability to send failure notifications to our shared Slack channel.
We recommend the same: communicate test failures to the team. But, we also recommend that there be a clear hierarchy of responsibility for finding the cause of any load test failure.
If there’s one person on your team responsible, great — or if you decide the first person to act on it is responsible, that’s great too. You can treat the test failure as a backlog item in your agile DevOps process.
Once you - or your teammate - have started identifying issues, you can share your discoveries easily in LoadImpact.
Easily share results
It’s super easy to share test results with teammates. Since you can organize your tests in projects (like folders), just share the project with your teammate(s). To do so, click on the project you want to share, then click "Manage Organization.” Add teammates by email address (and set permissions).
When you share your test results with someone else, they’ll see all the metrics you’ve overlaid in your test results. For instance, if you added a throughput metric, such as "Requests/s” or "Bandwidth” and want to share a correlation to VU Load Time or VUs Active, those will appear in your shared test results, too. (We call this Results View State Persistence, but call it whatever you like.)
Team Members and Permissions
Adding Team Members to your LoadImpact Project or Organization is an easy way to share results. But you can give them permission to script load tests, upload data stores and create user scenarios and even run tests.
Account owners can add different team members to different Projects because we all know not everyone is always working on the same things — especially in larger companies and with consultants.
Happy Testing!
For more information, check out these topics in our knowledge base:
Organizations, Adding Team Members, and Projects.