At mabl, we’re committed to empowering your software organization to reach the full potential of digital transformation and DevOps through intelligent, low-code test automation. Our platform unifies API, cross-browser, mobile web, and accessibility testing into an easy-to-use solution that enables teams around the world to achieve effective test coverage at scale and deliver faster, higher-quality releases. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the addition of performance testing to mabl!

Why We Built Performance Testing into mabl

Performance has a profound impact on user satisfaction, conversion, and retention: a 1 second delay in response time can reduce web conversions by 7% and 53% of consumers will abandon a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Likewise, 45% of people will leave a slow application or website with a bad impression of your business. 

Most teams recognize the importance of performance in building great user experiences, and they understand that they should test to confirm that applications perform well under load. Unfortunately, the cost and complexity of traditional performance testing puts the practice out of reach for many. For the past several years, mabl’s customers have been emphasizing that they’d like to use mabl for load testing as they were frustrated with their alternatives:

  • Point solutions require highly specialized knowledge, creating siloed efforts/expertise
  • Managing duplicate logic in functional and performance tests wastes time
  • Traditional scripts are fragile and require significant maintenance, reducing productivity
  • Dedicated infrastructure is not well suited for load testing, leading to bottlenecks and capital inefficiency

We understood these challenges and decided to empower teams to make performance testing a routine part of their workflows, starting with API load testing.

Introducing API Load Testing

Load testing at the API layer is critical to overall application performance since the API layer is typically where the more complex logic lives. Enabling API load testing is a natural extension to mabl’s unified test automation platform - low-code, cloud-powered, and integrated with modern software delivery pipelines. 

Versatile low-code automation: Like browser testing, API testing, and accessibility checks, mabl’s approach to load testing is low-code, allowing your team to create and maintain tests without writing scripts or using specialized frameworks. Unlike traditional frameworks designed for siloed workflows, mabl allows you to reuse existing API tests and even import Postman Collections for performance tests. Taken together, the low-code approach and reuse dramatically reduce setup time.

Cloud-powered: Mabl performance tests run in the cloud for maximum scalability and efficiency, with no infrastructure for you to maintain. Results are processed in real-time and presented in shareable, easy-to-analyze reports, allowing you to inspect changes in latency and error rates under increasing load. 

Integrated: Native integrations with popular CI/CD solutions and a flexible command line interface make it easy to integrate performance tests into your pipelines, enabling your team to proactively discover issues during development rather than risk costly issues in production. 

Join the Low-Code Performance Testing Transformation 

API load testing is valuable for any application that relies on APIs - which is to say the vast majority of modern apps. By continuously assuring that systems can handle the volume of API requests that you see in production, you confidently ship new changes knowing that any API and backend changes will not increase latency or error rates under load. 

Mabl lowers the barrier to performance testing by building on your team’s domain knowledge and functional testing skills. By reusing API tests in performance tests, your team can eliminate the need to maintain performance scripts separate from your functional tests and thereby turn the practice of performance testing from a complex burden into a low-effort routine that helps you continuously validate that your releases are ready for production load. 

API load testing is now available to mabl users and those registered for a free trial in early access. Explore how performance testing in mabl’s low-code test automation platform can improve your customer experience and request early access to this feature.