UI Performance Testing with Taurus and Blaze Meter

Recently we have identified few intermittent issues in our product and issues are reproducing only when there is load on our product. We just wanted to start basic ui performance testing to uncover issues in our product. We have started with Jmeter but it isn’t easy for the beginner to work with Jmeter as tool itself comes with steep learning curve. In this post, we will take a look at Taurus, It is an open source test automation tool that extends and abstracts Jmeter, and helps to overcome these challenges. Taurus provides simple way to create, run and analyze the performance tests.

Taurus is an acronym that stands for Test Automation Running Smoothly, which reflects its baseline mission - making the process of test configuration and execution as simple as possible. Following are the Taurus features:

• extremely simple setup and upgrading
• an easily-readable, version control friendly and unified DSL (Domain-specific language) to define load test scenarios
• the ability to execute existing JMeter (or Grinder or Gatling or Selenium) tests
• the ability to create new tests from scratch using the aforementioned DSL
• the ability to merge multiple existing test scripts and/or DSL-driven tests into a single scenario
• real-time reporting
• multiple test output formats, including but not limited to:
• a native results format of the underlying testing tool
• integration with the blazemeter.com reporting service
• console stats and pseudo-graphic charts during the test execution (which can be combined with the Blaze Meter integration
• a JUnit-compatible test results format
• an easy way to define flexible pass/fail criteria. In case the results exceed a threshold, it is possible to automatically mark test(s) as failed
• platform-independency - runs where Python and Java can run