BlazeMeter and Perfecto | Better together

Like Perfecto, BlazeMeter is a continuous testing platform that enables testing without constraints. BlazeMeter facilitates UI functional testing, user experience testing, API testing and monitoring, and performance testing. You can also generate virtual services and synchronize test data across tests, services, and systems under test.

Using Perfecto and BlazeMeter together allows you to simplify, accelerate, and maximize continuous testing across desktop web and mobile platforms. While the integration is loose, there are various use cases that show the value of working with both products in tandem.

Learn about the following use cases and get familiar with additional resources (where applicable):

For more information on BlazeMeter, see the BlazeMeter documentation at https://help.blazemeter.com.

With any questions or for implementation assistance, contact Perfecto Support.

Tip: The easiest way to set up test flows with Perfecto and BlazeMeter is through Quantum and the BlazeMeter API. You can also enable unified reporting in BlazeMeter.

Test data generation

Test data is vital for mobile automation testing with Perfecto. Every test requires data, and every test environment requires test data in its setup. But supplying quality test data to create and execute more comprehensive and realistic test scenarios is challenging and time consuming. You will need unique user names, email addresses, postal addresses, credit card details, to name only a few examples.

This kind of data is difficult to prepare, for several reasons: You cannot rely on production data. Using "dummy" data such as "Jane Doe" for names or "555-555-5555" for phone numbers does not work. And data masking is not an ideal technique and may not be suitable for new functionality. All of this adds up to team inefficiencies, bottlenecks, dependencies , and test data inconsistencies.

Pairing Perfecto with BlazeMeter test data allows you to generate and leverage massive quantities of high quality, synthetic test data for your mobile app testing according to your requirements. When combining Perfecto with BlazeMeter for test data generation, creating, synchronizing, and managing test data becomes quick and easy—all via a simple API.

You can generate:

  • Test data that is free of personal identifiable information (PII) to comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

  • Missing data to extend coverage or to conduct edge testing

  • Data for negative testing to ensure your application is robust enough to handle the input of wrong, unexpected, or bad data

It is also possible to download a CSV file with generated data from BlazeMeter and use it as base input for DataTables in Scriptless Mobile.

Watch this video for a demo of how you can create a data model in BlazeMeter and connect it to your Perfecto mobile automation test.

When working with Perfecto and BlazeMeter test data in tandem, you use:

  • Perfecto for automated mobile testing

  • BlazeMeter for managing the data model and generating synthetic test data

  • Your Perfecto test script to connect to BlazeMeter using your API key and a GET API call to load fresh test data

    You can also parameterize the script by replacing static values with dynamic values from BlazeMeter.

For more information:

Service Virtualization creation

The BlazeMeter Service Virtualization feature lets you dynamically create mock (or virtual) services that remove constraints and dependencies by standing in for external or internal resources that may not be available for testing when you need them. When testing mobile apps, common roadblocks include requiring an environment to test in that may not be ready, data to use in the test, time or resource constraints in departments that you depend upon, or added pressure on time constraints from management teams that do not take all these dependencies into account.

The following scenarios are examples where Service Virtualization is needed:

  • You want to start mobile automation testing early, but some services are still in development and not completely ready to be included.

  • You need to run tests that depend on third-party API endpoints but cannot do so without affecting the live service. It is possible that the third-party API provides a sandbox environment for performance testing, but using this environment can incur costs that you would rather avoid.

Your mobile app talks to a mobile gateway, which then communicates with the backend services. But what if the mobile gateway itself is not available for testing? With BlazeMeter Service Virtualization, you can virtualize a mobile gateway or other backend services to work faster and more efficiently, thereby preventing bottlenecks in your CI/CD pipeline.

Watch this video for an overview of BlazeMeter Service Virtualization. At the time this video was recorded, the feature was called Mock Services.

For more information:

End-user experience testing

End-user experience (EUX) is critical for mobile applications. It can make the difference between end users using the app or uninstalling it. This becomes especially critical with an influx of users and systems under load.

EUX testing helps you get a better understanding of the real user experience when the system is under load. It involves executing a Selenium or Appium test that shows what users would see in their application at different points while a load test is running in the background. This allows you to figure out at what load your application's performance deteriorates or fails from the perspective of someone actually using your app.

By pairing Perfecto and BlazeMeter, you can perform user experience (UX) load testing that simulates real-world conditions for your mobile devices. With BlazeMeter, you can create load on the backend of your application, scaling up to two million virtual users in the cloud, while running an interactive or automated test against one or more devices in the Perfecto cloud to see if and how this affects the experience of the end user:

  • Does the UI become sluggish? 

  • Do timeouts occur? 

  • Are load times longer than usual?

  • Which users are impacted and under what conditions?

  • What causes the slowness? 

In addition, this kind of testing helps evaluate the messages presented to users, ideally leading to improved messaging in the UI.

To perform UX testing with Perfecto and BlazeMeter, you run two tests in parallel: the load test in BlazeMeter and the manual mobile test in Perfecto. Watch this short demo to see how it works.

Performance testing

Performance testing is an essential part of mobile app testing, and the earlier in the development cycle you conduct it, the better. The backend of your application, the infrastructure that your app relies upon, must be stable even if thousands of users are working with the app at any one time. How much load can the backend handle? What are its limitations? In contrast to EUX testing, performance testing is less concerned with how this affects the experience of the end user.

With BlazeMeter, you can upload and configure performance tests in minutes, scale up and simulate over two million virtual users from locations across the globe, and run multiple tests in parallel to speed up test cycles. By using BlazeMeter and Perfecto side by side, you can run these performance tests against devices in the Perfecto cloud to understand how your application holds up under the strain of overwhelming traffic depending on the source. You can combine BlazeMeter server -side metrics with client-side single user performance metrics in the Perfecto UI or by creating HAR files and conducting HAR file analysis. Both Perfecto and BlazeMeter reporting capabilities assist you in analyzing and understanding the rest results.

Tip: To overcome a challenge that many performance testers face, you can use Scriptless Mobile. Scriptless Mobile lets you quickly create and run performance tests without depending on scripting languages such as Java. This greatly reduces the test creation time.

For more information on load testing with BlazeMeter, see the following tutorials:

For more information on performance testing with Perfecto, see: 

API testing and monitoring

The backend services of your application need to be up, running, and stable 24/7. When an API does not perform as expected, it can result in a serious issue with your app's functionality and user experience. To ensure that the mobile gateway and other downstream systems are available and to receive alerts if any issues arise, you can leverage BlazeMeter's API testing and monitoring capabilities for your app. These capabilities let you:

  • Verify that your API returns the correct data, define what a successful API looks like, and create tests for complex workflows by chaining API requests together

  • Test all APIs from a single platform without having to change between tools

  • Monitor API performance from different locations across the globe and compare the performance of endpoints and workflows in the BlazeMeter dashboard to find potential issues and slowdowns

  • Monitor APIs across the full development lifecycle to increase their resiliency, find bugs faster, and fix issues earlier

To learn more, sign up for the free Master API Monitoring course at BlazeMeter University.