Testing With Browser Mob

The Project

I recently got the chance to work on a project using BrowserMob for automated testing.  BrowserMob allows you to run Selenium test scripts "in the cloud". In my case I was not testing functionality, but instead  testing performance of a Flex app. I needed to test latency and throughput of messages being dispatched through the Flex messaging system via http://code.google.com/p/amfast/. This proved very difficult to test locally, but was a snap with BrowserMob.

The Testing

I created a simple Flex client to send and receive Flex messages in a way that replicated a production environment. I also created a custom server component to replicate the production environment and to help log message data to be analyzed later. After getting the client and server running locally, I signed up for a BrowserMob account and launched several browsers with their web interface.

The whole process was simpler than it should have been, and I was very impressed with how well it worked. I highly recommend trying out but BrowserMob for performance and load testing applications, and I'm hoping to get a chance to try out running more full featured automated functional tests in the future.