This month, the Flood team celebrated an important milestone: Flood turned 7 years old!
We spent this year making significant improvements to Flood across the board, guided by our mission of making load testing accessible to everyone.
Here's are this year's highlights.
Analytics
We kicked off our 7th year with a new and improved real-time dashboard called Explorer, showing a continuous view of application performance. The Explorer improves Flood's analytics capabilities and enables flooders to more easily spot trends over several runs of a project.
Pricing and Account
Based on feedback that our pricing could be confusing, we started 2020 with a revamp of our pricing model, moving to charging based on Virtual User Hours (VUH), an industry standard. The new pricing model also included moving to a pay-as-you-go system of billing and introducing a new permanently free tier of load testing. After months of work, we were thrilled that this change was well-received by the Flood community.
In February, we introduced Advanced Account Management features, giving teams using Flood finer permissions controls for Flood resources.
Responding to the novel coronavirus
As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world, we leapt into action to offer free load testing to all government organizations fighting COVID-19. The state of New Jersey was one of the first to take us up on this offer, and we helped them prepare to process 10,000 loan and grant applications per hour.
With the help of the BOINC platform, we began contributing our spare computing capacity towards medical research for diseases like COVID-19.
We shared some tips for load testing during uncertain times. We also shared some collaboration tips for how we're staying motivated throughout this crisis as a team that has always worked remotely.
Infrastructure and Security
We're constantly working to help load testers run their tests anywhere. This year, we launched Flood Agent, a way to turn any machine into a Flood node and run load tests on it remotely. We've been asked about on-premise load testing for years, and we're very happy to deliver!
We added the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to our the list of cloud providers we integrate with, bringing the simplicity of Flood to your existing GCP accounts.
Our grid infrastructure got a major upgrade, including modernizing the design of some components, improving objects and traces, optimizing health checks for grids, and other under-the-hood improvements.
We acquired our SOC2 Type I Compliance this year, representing our ongoing commitment to security and privacy. We put security processes in place to prepare Flood for the next certification step: Type II compliance.
Support and Documentation
We unveiled a new marketing site and also streamlined our Stream Editor to make it easier to get started on Flood.
We quietly launched a public Community site, giving flooders a way to share Flood success stories and ask questions about load testing on Flood.
We consolidated our help documentation into Guides, our new knowledge base for everything to do with using Flood.
We also started a new YouTube video series called Ask a Flooder, where we answer some of our most frequently asked questions. Check out the audio podcast version here.
Conferences and Events
We sponsored the SAP Sapphire conference in May 2019, showcasing how to test SAP Fiori with Flood Element, an open source browser-level load testing tool based on Puppeteer.
In October 2019, we had our yearly in-person team meetup in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where we discussed future plans for Flood over banh mi.
In February 2020, we attended RubyConf in Melbourne, Australia, and were pleasantly surprised to see a presentation about how AirTasker uses Flood.
In April 2020, we partnered with our friends at TestProject and SpecFlow to launch the biggest testing survey of the year: the State of Open Source Testing survey. We asked over 1,700 testing professionals about testing to determine key trends, and we discussed our findings in a webinar. We also revealed some data about the state of browser-level load testing in 2020.
In May 2020, we joined Scott Moore's Performance Tour to talk about Flood and how one of our customers, Braze, are using Flood to test their platform, handling billions of transactions daily.
In June 2020, we discussed hybrid load testing at Joe Colantonio's PerfGuid virtual conference, showing how protocol- and browser-level load testing scripts can both be used to improve performance outcomes. Later that month, we also shared how to become a load tester at the virtual Tricentis User Conference.
What's next?
Nobody could have predicted the world we'd find ourselves in this year, but we're proud of how we've handled the unexpected. We may still be a small team, but we're a passionate bunch of people, and we really pushed ourselves this year to improve almost every single aspect of Flood.
Understanding data from load tests is one of the most difficult parts of a load tester's job, and one we want to make even easier. We're already working on something to help with data analysis, and we hope you'll be as excited about it as we are. Security will be an ongoing focus for us as well, as we make upgrades to the way we store customer data and prepare for the next step of SOC2 Compliance certification.
Thank you for 7 years of flooding! We can't wait to show you what we have planned for the next year.