Changing how we think about performance testing

Changing how you think about something is often difficult. Especially with software, it’s easier to keep operating with familiar conventions even as technology evolves.

That’s roughly what happened to me with performance testing.

Less than a year ago, I knew very little about it. We had one person in the company who did, and I mostly deferred to them. Then they left, and we still had systems to validate under load.

You’ve probably been in a similar situation yourself. Occasionally, we’re asked to work on something unfamiliar, and it helps if we anchor it to something we already know.

That’s why I reached for a performance testing tool called Artillery. It felt familiar because it let me reuse Playwright scripts. I realised we could take patterns we already knew and apply them to performance testing.

What I didn’t expect was how much it changed my perspective. Convenience was the obvious benefit, but the real shift was how I started to think about performance.

Even if you aren’t familiar with performance testing (as I was a year ago), I can assure you it’s much more accessible than you might think. Newer tools make it easier to measure performance in a way that matches how people actually use apps.

Performance testing tools are evolving. Traditionally, load testing has focused on the server by simulating lots of traffic in an application’s backend and watching how it responds. Browser-driven testing takes a different approach. It scales real user flows in a browser, so you can measure performance closer to what users actually experience.

I wrote up what I learned here. I hope you’ll find it useful:

Rethinking performance testing for the modern web with browsers