Performance is a vital component of user experience. Users will leave—and likely not come back—if your site is slow. If they stay, they’ll be less likely to buy from you if their experience is subpar. To add insult to injury, they’re even less likely to find your app to begin with, since Google punishes poorly-performing sites in the search results. To solve the problem of poor performance, knowledge of what impacts performance is essential.

Software is one of the most complex tools invented for practical use. One misplaced character can break an entire application. So, careful testing is an essential requirement before publishing any code. In this article, you will learn about two fundamental types of software testing, unit testing and integration testing, and how your team can implement them in your CI/CD pipelines to validate your code quickly and deliver new features to your users with confidence.

Performance testing is an essential component of building fast and reliable web services. Until recently, this testing typically happened later in the development process and was often performed by a separate team or even a third party. But speed is the competitive advantage for companies, and prioritizing testing during the development process can speed time to market for new applications.

While there is a lot of focus on the three pillars of observability to provide insight into application performance in production, load testing is the other side of the observability story. By using the open source load testing tool k6 — which Grafana Labs acquired earlier this year — developers can simulate real-world traffic to test the reliability and performance of software changes and new features, not to mention flag performance issues before impacting end users.

NestJS is fast becoming the de facto framework for NodeJS projects. Unlike older frameworks, NestJS was built with TypeScript, which has become commonplace in the JavaScript community. Frameworks like NestJS seem to be preferred by teams that adopt TypeScript. NestJS supports building APIs in REST and GraphQL. The goal of this tutorial is to show how you can add unit and integration tests to a NestJS GraphQL project and automate the testing process with CircleCI.

Is it possible to use just one tool to test everything? Although it may sound like a developer’s daydream, it is almost possible with Cypress, a JavaScript frontend testing framework. Cypress is built specifically for JavaScript frontend developers, and they can use it to start writing tests quickly without needing to add third-party dependencies or packages. This is a benefit missing from other tools like Selenium. In this tutorial, I will guide you through using Cypress to test an API.

Wondering about continuous testing in DevOps? We explain what it is, how it works, best practices, and the tools you need for success.

The CircleCI Insights dashboard was designed to help you improve your delivery efficiency. We launched the dashboard a year ago to provide teams with actionable data for optimizing your pipelines. Since then, we’ve been listening to your feedback. By far, the most requested functionality is the ability to gain further visibility into test performance.

At Speedscale, we are on the cutting edge of defining autonomous testing for the cloud era. However, we aren’t the only company trying to solve this problem and we enjoy learning from every perspective. That’s why Facebook’s recent blog article about autonomous testing caught my eye. They’ve built a sophisticated autonomous test system that introduces many of the same techniques we utilize.