Remote Client Web Performance Monitor

Selenium is an excellent open source tool for automated functional testing of web applications. We use it along with JBehave for automation and  Behavior Driven Development of our large-scale browser-based application.  The tests are run from Atlassian Bamboo and we use Sauce Labs for the cross browser testing. This setup allows for a full regression testing of the application on all supported browsers with very little manual testing. This automation, along with high-coverage unit-test suite (Junit/Mockito) and puppet-based one-click deployment, is core to our continues improvement & delivery platform.

We are also using selenium to measure Page Load time of our Single Page Web application (ExtJS4.0).  Selenium WebDriver provides more reliable page load time then Selenium RC, as it uses browser's native support for automation as oppose to injecting JavaScript.

This extends Selenium ability to act as an automated performance testing tool, it can  validate ( or just log) performance of the application, along with performing functional validation.

We went a step further with Selenium implementation, were we used its WebDriver to run tests on any remote client browser to understand the real performance of the application. The user is given a test URL that runs the application via Selenium webdriver on the client browser and collect required diagnostic data.

Selenium has a remote server, which allows the selenium tests to run on remote browser. However, the remote server needs to be installed and running on the client machine, and we did not want that. We needed a reverse solution, where selenium tests run on a remote server and the application runs on the local browser.

This was solved by creating a simple web app (servlet) that can identify  its browser (using user-agent request header) and based on browser type, invoke appropriate webDriver. It would then run the application and collect load time metrics. This metric is sent via HTTP/JSON to CouchDB. I am a big fan of  CouchDB, it provides rapid application development and  schema flexibility for tool’s feature extension. 

I am searching a way to reuse my existing Selenium scripts for Load Testing, maybe run them through JMeter and capture response time in CouchDB. For now, we are using HP LadRunner with AJAX extension and it is functioning well.