Performance Testing meets Continuous Integration – Bamboo and Blitz

This is a guest blog post by Kowsik Guruswamy, CTO for Mu Dynamics, the company that powers Blitz. Kowsik is a self proclaimed cloud junkie that can reconcile big data with packets.

A Pig of a Problem

We all know what happens when your app performs like a pig. You lose users, customers and revenue. Your app is slow, the failing pigs don’t amuse your customers and you hear about it as the trending topic on Twitter. In most cases you don’t even know that it’s slow until you push the app into production, multiple times a day. Think of the popular April fools joke by  Atlassian –  Angry Nerds App. How can you identify performance bottlenecks earlier in the cycle? And, if you don’t discover them, how do you find and fix them as fast as possible?

Enter Blitz – a performance testing tool, built by Nerds that were angry at how the existing tools weren’t keeping pace with the new Application Development Lifecycle that has Continuous Integration as its center piece.

What’s Blitz?

Blitz is a cloud-based, self-service performance testing and monitoring platform. Built for Nerds that don’t have time to write complex scripts and become performance experts, Blitz extends and embraces tools like cURL and Firebug to make it easy for Nerds to integrate performance testing and monitoring into the Continuous Integration process. With global points of presence, you can test and monitor your app from all around the world, especially from where your users and customers are.

Bamboo, meet Blitz

When Atlassian launched Bamboo OnDemand offering, we saw a perfect opportunity to bring load and performance testing into the Continuous Integration cycle. With Bamboo, you are already running all of the unit tests and potentially pushing the app to staging and/or production on a continuous basis. The Blitz plugin for Bamboo allows you to run load and performance tests against your staging (or production) app as a Bamboo task. By helping you identify performance bottlenecks on a continuous basis, Blitz fills a very important gap in the Continuous Integration cycle.

Bamboo Integration

After you sign up to Blitz, add the Blitz Bamboo Plugin from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange to your Bamboo installation. Grab the API key from Blitz and create a task.

If you are using Bamboo to stage your app on various cloud providers, you can use Blitz to test your app for performance as part of each build. You can also set thresholds of errors during the test so if your app starts misbehaving and your performance degrades, the task will fail. Once the task finishes, all of the metrics and results are stored within Bamboo itself. This makes it easy for Nerds to do cool trending and analysis of app performance over time.

Game On

Who knew throwing nerds could be such fun! Blitz makes performance testing a super fun sport, something all Angry Nerds can benefit from. So go on, sign up, follow us and just have fun making your app scale out, continuously, in a sporty way!

You can download the plugin, check compatibility, and find the documentation from The Blitz page on Atlassian’s plugin exchange.

Disclaimer: No birds, pigs or Nerds were harmed in this blog. However, we can’t say the same about the performance bugs.

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