Now what I’m curious to hear is what concrete tools you’ve been using, why you’ve been using them, and what your experience with them is.
I’d like to focus on language agnostic tools (speak it doesn’t assume the language your app is built in) but if your language of choice has a super-rad thing you’d like to showcase in this category then feel free to do so.
For simpler projects I generally look at top stats on the server and monitor resources used per page/request type.
This is really interesting when you turn things on like caching, and also really good for when you don’t have much control over the software used - eg, when you use Wordpress, Discourse or other 3rd party software.
But I was thinking more of tooling which you’d be using before your application hits production. Anything from ensuring it can handle the expected load, verifying that API endpoints don’t behave unexpectedly when receiving garbage data, performing UI tests, to checking data sent to third-party services.
To speak in concrete terms, here are some tools I know of (but haven’t necessarily used) which fall into this category:
We’re currently using Selenium (legacy) for UI testing before deploys. We’re investigating Selenium WebDriver as an alternative, but it’s slow going as we’re bottlenecked in dev at the moment.
Like @ShowMeBillyJo, the only one I’ve used is Selenium as well, however when working on projects solely (most of the time now) I generally skip anything that gets in the way of adding features so tend to skip testing, etc
I think Dave Thomas said something similar too recently, which makes me feel less bad about it
