6 key criteria to choose the best performance testing tool

Performance testing is a crucial stage in application development. Therefore, choosing the right tool often determines the success of the project, can contribute to better use of resources and reduce the overall cost of performance testing. How to choose such a tool??

Performance tests are an indispensable part of the application development process. They help ensure the expected level of service and improve the overall user experience. Applications that haven't been subjected to proper performance testing may encounter problems related to poor scalability, instability or slow response times. This, in turn, can lead to user dissatisfaction, damage to the company's reputation and loss of potential customers. Choosing a performance testing tool is the first and most important requirement in the planning phase. However, there are many paid as well as open-source options available on the market. How to choose the right one??

The best testing platform – what does it mean?

When choosing a platform for performance testing, you should be guided by the needs of the specific project. Still, some universal criteria are always worth considering:?

1. Scalability

The platform should allow you to scale your tests to simulate the actual application load. It is important to choose a tool that will allow you to easily increase the number of users and generate high loads.

2. Flexibility

The platform should provide flexibility in creating and customizing test scenarios. It should be possible to configure different parameters, such as the number of users, frequency of requests or test scenarios, to fit the specifics of the system under test.

3. Analysis of results

The platform must offer the ability to analyze test results in detail. The tool should generate clear reports, showing performance metrics such as response time, throughput or server load. It's good if the platform also provides data visualization tools, and ideally, allows you to identify the causes of errors that occur.?

4. Integrations

If we are using other tools or frameworks in our development process, it is worth noting the integrations available in the platform for performance testing. Can we easily integrate with CI/CD, performance monitoring or other tools we use daily?

5. Ease of use

When choosing a platform, you should pay attention to its intuitive user interface and ease of use. The tool should be easy to set up, run and monitor. The less time it takes to learn and configure the tool, the faster we can start testing. From this angle, the ideal choice is open-source, which is supported by the IT community and easy to get help if only in the form of documentation, and tutorials.

6. Cost of the tool

This is an important parameter, and although last on our list, it will often be crucial. As we mentioned because of the cost, companies often choose free open-source tools. Alternatively, licensed platforms tend to offer packages based on the number of users or protocol types. Cloud-based solutions, on the other hand, are an in-between option, as you are only charged for generating the desired load. An open-source tool can be used to prepare a test script, upload it to the cloud and run the test. Such tools are cheaper than licensed ones.

Bolt – the answer to the challenges of performance testing

How to reconcile all these criteria? In response to the challenges, an open-source platform Bolt was created to enable performance testing with unprecedented functionality. Behind its creation is the team of software house Acaisoft, which encountered limitations from the available tools during a project for a client.?

We needed a flexible testing platform that could be customized to meet specific requirements. Unfortunately, none of the popular tools met our expectations, so we decided to create our own. Once we made sure that Bolt was functional and efficient, and very easy to use, we decided that we would make the platform available free of charge. We believe in the power of the community we are a part of and hope that in this way we will help other developers achieve better results – Adam Nowaczyk , CEO of Acaisoft

And so Bolt was created, which allows you to add your repositories with performance tests and define several different parameters, as well as integrate with monitoring tools (such as Prometheus) and test your infrastructure at the same time.

A huge advantage of Bolt is that it allows applications to be tested internally, in their cluster, without the need to expose them to the outside world, which can sometimes be a serious problem for many companies – Adam Nowaczyk , CEO of Acaisoft

How does Bolt work?

The tool allows you to carry out heavy-load performance tests without limitations, compare results and generate reports, which makes it much easier to analyze and optimize applications. Bolt uses the Locust framework and Python. The only requirement is to place a test script in the "tests" directory. Test scripts can use external packages and user-written packages. Thus, Bolt provides flexibility and the ability to customize the tool to meet specific needs.

Learn more and get Bolt today: https://bolt.acaisoft.tech