Your testers have verified that everything works as expected. Your developers have fixed all the bugs that your testers have found. Your roadmap looks great and your’e ready to release ahead of schedule.

But then there’s the final hurdle: user acceptance testing.

Apart from a few typos, and minor usability issues that can be addressed in a later release, there is one glaring complaint:

When real world users test against real world data in a real world environment – they all say:

It’s too slow.

What can you do? Refactoring the architecture is needed, but why didn’t testers notice this in QA? It will take weeks to profile, and maybe months to fix the problem.

Functionally — technically — everything works as expected. But performance testing against a production load wasn’t done until the end. How could it be?

At One Shore, we can help you integrate performance and load testing (they’re not the same thing) into your testing delivery pipeline. Like all other bugs, performance bugs are easier to fix when they are caught earlier.

By adding performance checks to your functional testing flow, your can get application performance data early to optimize (or cut out) features that are too slow. And by load testing before releasing to production, in environments that look like production, you can find those architectural bottlenecks that are so hard to fix when it’s already released.

You’ll need production-like test data, but you can’t wait on real users. You’ll need to generate data that looks like production, or migrate production data, but mask it so that no sensitive information is leaked. And you’ll need to generate a significant load to spot those issues where memory, disk io, or CPU become bottlenecks under traffic spikes (like Black Friday or Tax Day) that your normal load could normally handle.

If you have performance and load problems already, don’t despair. There are steps you can take to combat the problem methodically, and to reduce the chance of a similar disaster again.

Test Automation makes testing faster and easier. It frees up developer time to focus on delivering features. It gives assurance to DevOps and SRE teams that deployments and releases are successful. And it enables testers to spend more time doing high value exploratory testing and finding bugs.

But if there are still manual steps in your test automation, it’s not fully automated. If only one person can execute your test automation successfully, then that person can become a bottleneck (and will probably spend all their time helping other people to deliver their test results.)

In order to fully automated test automation, to provide the fastest feedback to developers, product owners, and others, you need tests to be triggered on every commit, every deploy, to every environment. And you need accurate, meaningful results published ASAP where everyone can see them.

No more emailing PDF or HTML test reports. No more passing around cut and pasted test environment statuses.

One Shore can help you fully integrate test automation into your software delivery pipeline and handle notifications and alerts when tests fail — so that nobody is surprised by test results that are out of date.

You can run your test automation locally, and may even have set up a Selenium Grid and gotten your tests running as part of a Continuous Delivery pipeline using Jenkins or Github Actions.

But tests are still slow. And you’re only testing on a single browser (Chrome, most likely.)

You need to run tests in parallel, but you don’t have the resources to scale up.

If you’re investigating SaaS testing tools like Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, LambdTest, Perfecto, Headspin, or Cypress.io but you could use some help getting your test automation working with these services, One Shore can help.

We’ve worked with all of these vendors and more, and we can help you with setting up a tunnel, proxy, or VPN to run tests against your internal dev, test, and staging environments, and scale your test automation in the cloud.

Has your test automation grown ad-hoc into a complex mess?

Slow test runs, flaky tests, high maintenance costs, low visibility, and difficulty training testers to use your test framework are signs that you could use a test architecture overhaul.

Let’s talk about what you can do to bring back fast, reliable test results.

One Shore can help you with a test framework assessment, tester skills review & training, and test requirements coverage analysis to help you get back to where you want to be in terms of test automation.

We will help you understand where you are, make a plan to get back on track, and implement the steps to get you back on track with test automation.