Inside GFT Poland: Performance Testing Community (PTC)
Who are they and what do they want to achieve? Read all about it below in an interview with Szymon Jankowski, our Senior Software Test Engineer.
Edyta: Why performance testing?
Szymon: The cost of potential downtime depends on a number of factors, such as the industry or services affected, but typically means thousands or even millions of dollars in lost revenue (resource). The best way to prepare for incidents like this is to find performance bottlenecks and improve the whole system, and to do that we need to test different scenarios using performance testing tools and processes. That’s why we launched a performance testing community in February this year.
Edyta: Okay, tell me more about members of this community. Who are you?
Szymon: We are a group of performance testing enthusiasts/experts (of course) from the Testing Job Family who have come together to form a group that will tackle the most pressing performance related issues. We all have our own experiences with different tools and processes and want to share them as well as learn new things. And we are open for new members, so if you are already on #teamGFT, let me know.
Edyta: What does PTC want to achieve?
Szymon: We’ve set a number of goals to help us stay focused.
Our key priorities are:
- sharing knowledge, experience and ideas;
- exploring new tools and processes;
- and of course, helping teams to implement performance testing. As we need projects to validate our ideas and bring real value to our clients, we are happy to participate in different projects.
Edyta: You are a fresh community, but I have heard that you already achieved a lot. Can you tell me more about it?
Szymon: As a group, we already have a lot to be proud of, especially in terms of increasing Testing team knowledge about performance testing:
- We’ve prepared a set of materials on performance testing. For example, you can find out why performance testing is important and how to get started in your own project.
- We’ve completed the first round of trainings on performance testing using JMeter.
- 30 people took part in remote and live trainings (in our office in Łódź and Poznań). Workshops were such a success that we are already planning next ones!
- We are actively researching new tools to add to our stack. As for some of the recent topics: we’ve checkedDSL for JMeter, so you don’t have to use the clunky UI to create test scripts and compared which of the paid services offers best value for money, Octoperf or Blazemeter,
On top of that, we are actively consulting with teams to find a performance testing tools and techniques that a fit their needs best.
Edyta: Nice, that’s a lot! So, what’s next?
Szymon: This isn’t of course everything we have done or plan to do. Our heads, as well as our backlog, are full of ideas so we will definitely have something new coming up. In the near future we are planning, for example, a training session on K6.io tool or building our own test framework. You will hear about us again!
Edyta: Thanks for a nice talk!
Szymon: Thanks a lot!
