Tag Archives: performance testing

Running Application Audits with Lighthouse

It was only recently that I was made aware of Lighthouse, a relatively new tool for running notable audits for web apps. It’s an open-source tool from Google, and can be found inside Chrome’s DevTools under the Audits tab.

Here’s what it looked like when our team tried it on a recent project (click GIF for a full view on another tab):

Running Audits with Lighthouse

The results:

Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO Audits

Apparently we did good on accessibility, SEO, and best practices. We don’t usually test for these things, but it’s nice to know that we do enough on them. The application running on localhost wasn’t configured to run on HTTPS yet so it’s about right that we failed that audit for best practice. It’s also true that our app was designed to have small font sizes.

Performance Audit

What’s interesting to see was the dreadfully poor app performance. Throttling our page on a mobile device with 3G connection, it took at least 20 seconds before anything appeared on the page. That’s not good.

And some culprits:

Performance Audit: Opportunities for Improvement

It seems we can do better with our images and style sheets. And it also looks like our JS takes too long to boot-up. We don’t exactly do high-detail performance testing at work so it is awesome to have such a quick audit report from within the browser that notify us about such issues early. At least we’ll know the areas where there’s room for improvement right away.

There’s no excuse to not testing performance (as well as SEO, accessibility, and best practices) on a web app anymore, as far as tools are concerned.

About Selenium Conference 2016

I had time over the holidays to binge watch last years Selenium Conference talks, which was as awesome, if not more so, as the talks during the 2015 conference. Automation in testing has really come a long way, alongside the advancements in technology and software development, and this brings forth new challenges for all of us who test software. It’s not just about Selenium anymore. Mobile automation still proves to be challenging, and soon we’ll have to build repeatable test scenarios for the internet of things – homes, vehicles, stores, among others. Software testing can only get more interesting by the year.

Here are my picks for the best talks from the conference, if you’re curious:

Five People and Their Thoughts (Part 3)

There’s always something new to learn, and these days watching webinars and recorded conference videos are good ways of finding and sharing interesting content about what practices do other people think is important in software testing. Lately I am finding myself getting more curious about performance and security testing, as well as the idea of software (including test code) as specification.

Some engaging thoughts about those topics, if you’re interested: