Using Firebug for Load Testing

Firebug is a popular tool among web developers that helps with JavaScript debugging, CSS and HTML design, and web performance optimization. It’s truly a Swiss Army Knife for web developers. But it’s also a great tool for anyone doing web testing. Unfortunately, not all testers know about Firebug yet, so this is our attempt to share.

Whether you’re using BrowserMob for load testing, Selenium for functional testing, or any other open source or commercial traditional load testing tool, Firebug can be a huge asset. Three things we at BrowserMob find love about Firebug are:

1. The ability to view and verify network traffic, including AJAX requests, timings, byte sizes, hosts, etc.
2. Inspecting elements so that you can get a “feel” for how the web page is constructed. This also helps for building out XPath expressions when using Selenium for functional testing or for load testing with BrowserMob.
3. Evaluating JavaScript expressions to trigger internal events as well as to test expressions you might run in your Selenium test.

We’ve put together a movie that shows how you can use these parts of Firebug to enhance your QA efforts. This will be the first of many video segments we plan to do, so check back often!