Our CTO Roger Abelenda gave an approach for creating performance tests with JMeter DSL from Selenium scripts at Selenium Conf 2023. He taught something really useful for test automation and performance testing services: How to reuse Selenium tests to verify that a site works accurately with a lot of traffic.

By Natalie Rodgers

Selenium Conf 2023 took place from March 28th to 30th in Chicago and has come out with plenty of Selenium test automation developers & enthusiasts from around the world.

The event featured amazing speakers, including Erika Chestnut, Diego Molina (Sauce Labs), Andrew Knight (Applitools), Bijoya Chatterjee, (Sony PlayStation), Corina-Adina Pip (Deloitte Digital), Liza Ivanova (Salesforce), Robin Gupta (Provar), Manoj Kumar (LambdaTest), Jason Huggins (Tapster), Noemi Ferrera (Amazon), and more. You can know them all right here.

“I think that the most important aspect of these events is for people and communities to connect and strengthen. For open source projects, and for communities in general, it is very difficult to actually connect, share experiences, and get to know what the people are doing with a tool. But most importantly get to know the people, their backgrounds, their needs, and insights,” outlined Roger Abelenda. 

“It is awesome to get to know in person famous people you follow, or whom you may have shared a call with but never got the chance to meet in person, sharing quality time between them and the rest of the community. It is also awesome to know some fellow community members, and share experiences, ideas, and stories,” he continued.

We take great pride in our CTO Roger Abelenda being there and making a wonderful presentation, representing Abstracta and America Latina because of the great work that is being developed there. Roger reviewed the basics of performance scripting and got to know JMeter DSL as an innovative tool for performance testing services. 

JMeter DSL is an open-source automation tool for performance that we have developed at Abstracta, with Roger as its prominent leader. As stated by Roger, JMeter DSL is a layer that simplifies the use of JMeter through code, also adding some functionalities. Examples include running tests on cloud services and evaluating test execution results.

He illustrated it this way: “We can think of JMeter DSL as an adapter or an extension. In relation to audio equipment, for example, JMeter DSL would be the remote control. In other words, the tool proposes a new way of using JMeter, which for some people may become more practical. This is because now they have the possibility to obtain benefits that they could not with the interface they had until now, or it was more difficult for them.”

“After the talk, many users told me that they were experiencing different issues in the past while trying to do the same thing, and they were amazed at how easily it could be solved. Many valued the initiative of JMeter DSL, as a way to simplify JMeter usage and make performance testing more approachable”, said Roger.  

“I also got several requests and questions for ideas to implement in the future, some of which have already been reflected as requests in the Github repository.”

As you can see, it is an amazing tool for performance testing services, and Roger managed to show it in an extraordinary way. Giving visibility to the tool is crucial to being able to maximize its impact and having more users eager to collaborate with its development and evolvement. 

Step By Step

Roger gave a quick approach to creating performance tests from Selenium scripts and an excellent way of reporting and reviewing load and user experience metrics. He taught how to reuse tests that were implemented with Selenium to verify that a site does not only work as expected with 1 user but with a big load of them. 

For this being done, firstly, he shared a Selenium Script, to get people to know what the application under test was about. Secondly, he generated a script for load testing with the JMeter DSL tool. Then he executed some loads and reviewed stats.

As a relevant part of Performance testing services, Roger showed a way to achieve this without leaving personal IDE. He did a live demo generating a load script using JMeter DSL, from an existing Selenium script, and ran it in combination with the Selenium script to generate a load and evaluate user experience while such load was being imposed and loaded by many users. 

On top of that, Roger also wanted to easily visualize how this load was impacting the service and user experience. Finally, he shared some data about JMeter DSL, its features, and benefits, and did a summary of what was done.

– How did you feel about being part of the event?

I felt great. Really honored to be selected to present in such a major event, representing some of the work being done in Latin America, and showing off some of the stuff we do in Abstracta. I got to know a lot of really nice people, meet people I already knew but never met in person, and got a lot of insights and ideas for the future. I am really grateful for the opportunity and would like in particular to thank Manoj Kumar and Bill McGee from the organization.

I loved that there were many Latin Americans at the conference, but there are a lot of Latin Americans in the Selenium community and I would like to see more of them giving presentations at these events. There is a lot to show of Latin work to the rest of the community and the world.

– What changes are coming for JMeter DSL? 

In general, this depends on what the community needs and what they ask for. Here it is crucial that if you as a user have questions, complaints or ideas for improvement of JMeter DSL, let us know by creating an issue or discussion in the repository.

Additionally, if you see that there is some already reported issue or discussion that is interesting for you, please upvote it. We regularly prioritize, and re-prioritize, the work to be done, and the effort invested in the tool, according to what the users need and request, their feedback, and Abstracta’s general experience in the area.

As for the short term, we plan to ease Azure integration and are considering exploring further ways to simplify usage for more users.

Did you see his talk but want to have the Step By Step to create performance tests with JMeter DSL from Selenium scripts? Don’t miss this article! You can also watch the complete talk on Selenium Conference’s Youtube channel.

Would you like to know more about JMeter DSL? Keep tuned to the releases, the repository changes, the discord channel, and be part of the community. Help us make JMeter DSL easier to use and better for everyone!

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