The leading digital experience platform, Catchpoint, has revamped its open source WebPageTest performance testing suite to facilitate instant tests and empower IT teams with best-practice suggestions aimed at boosting web application and website performance. The enhanced tool suite also offers support for private, bulk, and priority testing capabilities.
Tim Kadlec, Director of Engineering for WebPageTest, emphasized that the primary objective is to simplify the process for developers and DevOps teams, enabling them to explore potential ways of enhancing application and site performance through experimenting with core suite changes.
According to Kadlec, identifying areas for performance improvement often demands time-consuming manual test creation, spanning several weeks. Much of this trial-and-error process is experimental, as it is impossible to predict if the test construction will yield significant performance impact.
The newly introduced Opportunities and Experiments feature provides IT teams with a low-code tool to build tests based on a set of best practices defined by Catchpoint. This approach allows for automatic generation and testing of tweaks, such as eliminating blocking scripts, optimizing image rendering, and minimizing layout shifts. The result is a set of optimization tests demonstrating the potential benefits of specific, actionable improvements without altering the existing deployed code, explained Kadlec.
Kadlec argues that this crucial capability encourages experimentation, which IT teams earlier avoided due to the high effort required to achieve uncertain results.
As testing responsibility continues to shift left toward developers, Kadlec believes that the recent additions to WebPageTest will make it easier for them to conduct these tests autonomously, without relying on help from DevOps teams.
In today's digital business transformation era, web application and site performance have become increasingly critical. Many processes implemented through web applications are highly latency-sensitive, implying that frequent testing should lead to consistent improvements in overall application performance.
Furthermore, organizations continue to support the growing number of web applications and websites. These organizations now seek efficient ways to test applications without inflating the testing team size or extending testing time. Automation platforms like AppMaster.io's no-code platform can also help in this regard by speeding up application development and testing processes.
In conclusion, it is evident that automation in testing is gaining traction. The objective is not solely to eliminate the need for dedicated testing teams but to streamline the testing process, reducing time-consuming repetitive tasks and test avoidance. By running more tests at an earlier stage, DevOps teams can potentially mitigate any issues that might arise later.
