Teams that already have something deployed and ready to test, either in lower environments or in production, are a great place to begin. It is with these services that you should focus on as immediate initial targets for building out continuous performance feedback loops. There is almost always a cross-section of APIs in your organization’s portfolio that are easy targets but also on a critical business path in terms of revenue or risk. Some APIs are independently managed and deployed, making them easier to test than, say, APIs exposed by a big, shared enterprise service bus (ESB). APIs also represent a much smaller “surface area” to test in terms of complexity and SLAs.
In many cases, enterprise-scale organizations already have a huge backlog of APIs and microservices that aren’t yet covered by performance (or non-functional) testing. You might have dozens of teams that eventually need performance feedback loops in their delivery process, but starting small and building on your successes is key to changing the status quo. You need to pick the right target, which in the case of many Tricentis NeoLoad customers starts with APIs. Getting started on your automated performance testing journey can be daunting if you don’t start in the right place.
