past events

14 June 2023
A Medley of Frontend and Backend Performance Testing
In this talk, I want to introduce you to both frontend and backend performance testing and why a medley of these testing activities are needed to make sure that your website is performant. I'll also give a quick walkthrough as to how tools such as k6 can help with running both protocol-level (how performance testing is normally run through concurrent interactions at the protocol layer) and browser-level tests (testing with real browsers to provide a more realistic performance test). By the end of this talk, you should be equipped with new knowledge regarding frontend and backend performance testing which you can apply to your work projects.

31 August 2023
The Psychology of Web Performance
In this Masterclass, you will take a step back and explore the psychology of waiting and how it relates to web performance. As testers, we must test the system just like our end users. So, it's crucial to understand why page speed matters to deliver a product closer to our users' needs. Apart from the actual page speed, you must also understand that users have subjective perceptions of performance, which can impact your website's speed.

29 June 2023
A Hybrid Approach to Performance Testing with k6
Performance testing, in general, is a vast topic and can often be differentiated into two areas: frontend and backend performance. The most common activity in performance testing is generating load on a protocol level. However, relying on backend performance alone does not reflect the overall user experience, so ideally, you need to do both!
In this talk, I'll talk about how important it is to include both front-end and back-end performance testing as part of your strategies. I'll give a run-through of the advantages and limitations and what tools you can use. I'll also talk about a hybrid approach to performance testing and why adopting this approach is best if you want to achieve a holistic approach to your application's overall performance. Finally, I'll give a quick walkthrough on how tools such as k6 can help with this hybrid approach.

22 August 2023
A Hybrid Approach to Performance Testing
The golden rule of web performance states that for most web pages, less than 10–20% of the end-user response time is spent getting the HTML document from the web server to the browser, while 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front end.
When we talk about performance testing, the most common activity that we do is to load-test our backend servers. We come to a realisation that once we have optimised our servers and databases, our application is now performant. However, this should not be the case. Just because our servers have returned the response to a specific request doesn't mean that our users can see the response on the web page. Many factors affect frontend performance as well, and it's equally important to test to ensure that our users have the best user experience.
Historically, we have used separate tools for frontend and backend performance. But what if there is one tool that can do both?
In this talk, I want to introduce you to both frontend and backend performance testing and why a hybrid approach is needed to ensure your website is performant. I'll also give a quick walkthrough of how tools such as k6 can help run both protocol-level (how performance testing is typically run through concurrent interactions at the protocol layer) and browser-level tests (testing with real browsers to provide a more realistic performance test). By the end of this talk, you should be equipped with new knowledge regarding frontend and backend performance testing, which you can apply to your work projects.

31 May 2023
A Hybrid Approach to Performance Testing
In this talk, I want to introduce you to both frontend and backend performance testing and why a hybrid approach to performance testing is needed to make sure that your website is performant. I will also give a quick walkthrough as to how tools such as k6 can help with running both protocol-level (how performance testing is normally run through concurrent interactions at the protocol layer) and browser-level tests (testing with real browsers to provide a more realistic performance test).