StormRunner Load: Bridging the Gap

Agile. Performance engineering. Those in the software community would agree that these subjects are becoming increasingly important to many organizations’ software development life cycle. But what about agile performance engineering? The agile methodology is about much more than a daily stand up meeting, or “the minimum viable product.” It is about moving faster, without sacrificing quality. Not for the sake of doing so, but for the sake of keeping up with the competition. For the sake of survival…

There are many ways that organizations can move faster. Less micromanagement, improved communication channels, more coffee… but at the core of any organization’s successful implementation of a more agile software development life cycle is commitment to process, and tools that enable such a commitment to be made.

For some, agile is the all-out pursuit of speed, but for others, agile is no more about speed “than being human is about making blood (Knight, 353).” Of course, modern organizations rely on speed the same way that the body relies on blood, but the day to day operations of a business should not revolve around the mission of producing more speed. Speed is what allows us to achieve our business objectives, and should be the byproduct of well thought out, well implemented processes, and automation in every facet that can sustain it. Not just the automation of test cases or code pipelines, but the automation of tedious tasks that have left so many software development life cycles in limbo... which brings me to StormRunner Load.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s next generation performance testing solution was purpose-built for agile teams; integrating with development ecosystems in ways that allow agile teams to test earlier, and test often. While much has been made of StormRunner’s scalability, 3rd party integrations, and quite simply, its acknowledgment of the requirements and challenges facing agile teams, there is one innovation that is often overlooked, or maybe even misunderstood. StormRunner’s Real Time Predictive Analytics.

You will often hear one of HPE’s cronies refer to StormRunner Load as being “smart.” But little is said about what makes it smart, and most importantly, why that matters. StormRunner Load is smart because it leverages your own test data to identify anomalies in your applications' performance. Through the use of a proprietary algorithm, StormRunner Load is able to learn about, and predict your application's performance during a test and identify instances in which test data does not meet expectations. This means no more spending hours, even days combing through graphs looking for that one spike you saw while the test was running, but can’t seem to find now that all of the data has been aggregated. Ask any performance engineer… that’s a big deal. For the engineer, it means solving problems faster, and for the business, it equates to faster development cycles, higher quality applications, and happier customers. Much like test automation has changed the way organizations develop and understand their applications, StormRunner’s Real Time Predictive Analytics capabilities allows organizations to reallocate their time to solving problems rather than looking for them.

StormRunner’s unparalleled delivery of time saving capabilities across the full spectrum of what is involved in creating and running performance tests bridges the gap between agile methodologies and the practice of performance engineering. This ultimately allows speed to become the byproduct of a team’s day to day efforts rather than being an unattainable and misunderstood goal.

StormRunner in Action!

1) Example of aggregated analysis data in StormRunner Load. Notice the orange notification in the upper right corner.

2) Clicking the orange notification allows me to quickly see that StormRunner has identified an anomaly in my test, and even indicates when it occurred.

3) Clicking the anomaly notification shows me specifically where the anomaly occurred. I can now compare this anomaly to other analysis graphs and identify the root cause.

Learn more about StormRunner Load here!

Forrest Riddle, Solution Architect at HPE