Google’s Load Time Ranking Update

Performance testing makes the world turn.
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You may have heard that as of early July, Google updated its search algorithm to include the load time of mobile URLs. While we knew this was coming back in January (way to go Google for the pre-update announcement). For the performance tester, it has real implications — let's take a look.

Background

The stats available to the public only illuminate the fact that the mobile user experience has been suffering, that something had to be done to keep marketers in check:

10 Tips to Improve Automated Performance Testing Within CI Pipelines (Part 2)

Take a look at this second set of CI/CD tips.


The following is part two of our three-part series, "10 Tips to Improve Automated Performance Testing within CI Pipelines." This week's installment focus is on tips 3-6: keeping tests small and targeted, testing of segments before the whole, automating things that are not flaky, and saving time through smoke testing.

10 Tips to Improve Automated Performance Testing in CI Pipelines (Part 1)

Here's 1 and 2 of the how you can create a better CI pipeline.

Getting testing right in a Continuous Integration pipeline is a critical part of software development at web scale. For many companies, it's a challenge, particularly with automated performance testing. It's not for lack of effort. Many companies can't seem to realize the full value of their efforts. The reasons are many. Some testing efforts merely reinvent the wheel. Others are conducted randomly with no apparent intention other than just for the sake of execution. Ensuring the testing is both appropriate and aimed at meeting the business requirement(s) is a distant afterthought.

It doesn't have to be this way.

How Performance Testers Can Help Protect and Secure IT

In August of 2018 Bob Diachenko, Director of Cyber Risk Research at Hacken.io found that over 2 million Mexican citizens had their healthcare data leaked due to a security vulnerability in a system's database. At that same time, he found that the data of 93 thousand users of a popular babysitting app, Sitter, was also exposed. As if this isn't scary enough, in November, Marriott Corporation revealed that over the last four years hackers had broken into its reservation system and stealing the private data of over 500 million customers. That's more than the combined population of Russia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain combined!Securing and protecting.

Securing and protecting.

Given the security breaches that have occurred at places like Facebook (50 million profiles), Equifax (143 million), Yahoo (3 billion), eBay (145 million) and surprisingly, Adult Friend Finder (412 million), you'd think that companies would learn from one another. Many have, and yet, many have not. Data theft is still an all too common occurrence in the digital landscape. That's the bad news. The good news is that security has become a company-wide concern, not something relegated to a few compliance officers sitting in isolation in the data center. Companies have come to understand that everybody has a role in making sure that its digital infrastructure is secure and protected. This includes test practitioners and QA personnel.

Accommodating Human Behavior in Automated Testing

Human error needs to be accounted for.


I'm a big fan of test automation. To me, it's the best way to get software out the door. For the most part, automation brings a degree of speed and accuracy to the testing process that in many cases surpasses human capability. This is particularly true when it comes to UI testing. Having a roomful of testers sitting at keyboards entering data in the UI and then recording results can be a bottleneck when implementing testing in today's enterprise.

Three Killer Anti-Patterns in Continuous Performance Testing

Many developers have decided that building sustainable automated and continuous processes across the entire lifecycle, including performance engineering and testing, is a modern imperative. This article will highlight some important things to keep in mind when executing continuous performance testing. 

Are you ready?
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Avoid "Hurrying Up Just to Slow Down" Syndrome

There are a million causes of why we waste time. "Rework" isn't the only category in your value streams, not even close. Agile and iterative product teams often build prototypes to learn about the problem and to produce a useable product. While we could all improve planning and requirements gathering, we often find ourselves blocked from closing out work items by unanticipated dependencies and misaligned expectations.