LoadNinja’s key benefits fall into four areas:
Efficiency: Test engineers can create test scripts using just a web browser and playback the scripts with no coding. Simply input a URL and take the same actions that you’d like to test and the rest is done for you. You can even reuse certain steps across different scenarios rather than writing multiple versions of the same core scripts.
Accuracy: You can generate a true load on a web application with real browsers, which measures the performance of both server-side requests and responses, as well as client-side JavaScript and HTML rendering. For instance, LoadNinja shows you exactly how long the DOM takes to load in each step rather than just server response times.
Actionable Metrics: Real browsers have the most accurate performance data. LoadNinja lets you easily see response times and navigation timings that are clearly broken out by the step and number of virtual users. That way, you can easily pinpoint what’s causing the issue before diving deeper into code issues.
Inspect and Debug: Developers can visualize and detect errors by drilling down into specific virtual user sessions. By interacting with the DOM, they can easily see where bottlenecks originate to fix them in less time—there’s no need to try and correlate requests and responses with DOM-related events.
LoadNinja also works with Jenkins—the focus of this article—and any other continuous integration service via its public REST API. This makes it easy to incorporate performance tests into a test automation suite alongside unit and functional tests.