What a week it’s been! Emboldened by the success of the first Tricentis Accelerate conference in the US last year, the Flood team headed to San Francisco last week for another Accelerate, held on May 22nd and 23rd. We’re all just now heading back to our home bases in different parts of the world, but we’re still recovering from the excitement at the conference.
After a show of Chinese dragons dancing and weaving their way through the crowd on the conference floor, Tricentis CEO Sandeep Johri stressed in his opening keynote the importance of keeping up with change, and talked about how Tricentis is not only keeping up but actually leading the way and forging new paths to help companies produce quality software faster.
This year’s San Francisco Accelerate had the theme Automation @ the Speed of Change, and it’s one we can absolutely get behind. As load testers, we’re big fans of taking something manual and repetitive and making it faster, easier and more scalable. The question, though, is how to automate in the current landscape of perennially shifting technologies.
One of the answers proposed in the conference was Continuous Testing. Having CI/CD pipelines set up to automatically take software from code all the way through to load testing and post-release monitoring is essential for keeping up with constant change and frequent releases to production. Robert Wagner’s talk Service Virtualization, API Testing, and TDM: The Time is Now kicked off the first day with three key elements to any good continuous testing framework, and Chris Rolls from TTC expanded on this in his talk on seven critical success factors in continuous testing transformation. Jori Ramakers wrapped it up by walking attendees through the process of moving towards continuous testing.
Tom Murphy from Gartner discussed Robotic Process Automation (RPA), another recurring topic for the conference. His explanation of how to combine AI and machine learning with automation in order to decrease manual intervention was punctuated by the actual robots wandering the conference hallways. Some lucky conference goers even got to take them home! Stefan Januschke talked about the best and worst use cases for AI in testing, Neil Kosman led a discovery session on RPA, and Georg Thurner and Gijs Jekel hunkered down and taught us all about Tricentis RPA and how to use it to create software bots.
On the load testing front, Flood was strongly represented by some of our load testing champions. Molly Driscoll gave an introduction of what Flood is, providing some compelling reasons to use it. One of her favorite features is the speed with which Flood allows her to scale up to execute massive load against servers under test, prompting her to compare Flood with having “a performance lab at her fingertips”.
Flood co-founder Tim Koopmans took us back to the stone age in a charmingly anachronistic presentation about a caveman named Fred who desperately wants to load test in his talk Load Testing: What’s the Point? He coins the acronym SPEAR to cover five pillars of load testing: Scalability, Performance, Elasticity, Availability, and Reliability and explains why you need to competently wield all five of them.
Our other co-founder Ivan Vanderbyl teamed up with Judy Chung and Stefan Januscke to address some key components of the Tricentis end-to-end solution in a workshop called From Zero to Testing Hero with Tosca, qTest, and Flood. They demonstrated the integrations that exist among QTest, Tosca and Flood, building a strong case where manual test cases are linked to automated test cases and load tests, increasing coverage and speed in one fell swoop. It was a powerful showcase of Tricentis’ commitment to continuous integration and vision of the future.
Ryan Yackel, Elise Carmichael, and Wayne Ariola also demonstrated how the QTest Explorer can be used to record and generate Flood Element scripts that can then be run through Flood as load tests-- a great tool to quickly get up and running with load testing without scripting or programming required!
With our own Kevin Dunne to fly the flag for Flood, Neeraj Tripathi and Hector Martinez from one of our favorite customers, Toyota, took to the main stage to tell the story of how Toyota transformed their aging load testing assets and converted them into an Cloud Load Testing framework with Flood at its heart. Kevin gave an introduction of Flood while Neeraj and Hector explained exactly why they chose Flood over our competitors and the changes they’ve made to their processes to get to where they are today. Currently, about 40 teams within Toyota are using Flood as part of their regular testing cycles, with even more currently undergoing training to use it in the future!
We really enjoyed the talks at the conference, but the most exciting part was getting to see so many of you at the Cloud Load Testing booth and hearing about all the things you love about Flood as well as telling you about our plans for the future. We have a lot of things up our sleeve this year, and we can’t wait to show you what we’re doing next!
