Context

Adeo is the European leader in the home improvement and DIY market, and number 3 worldwide. Its companies : Leroy Merlin, Bricoman, Weldom, Zôdio… Gather 150 000 leaders and more than 1000 sales points over 20 countries.

Teams all over the world enable ADEO companies be useful to inhabitants while making home a positive place to live.

Thomas Pitteman Very fond of everything related to computers, he worked in the transport industry before merging work with passion by joining Adeo in 2018. He is now head of load testing, responsible for harmonizing testing methodologies and the onboarding process. He was also an important part of the benchmarking process which resulted in the selection of Octoperf as the new load testing tool.

Marc Lavieville is lead Quality Manager at Adeo. Always attracted to innovations and new challenges, he worked in many different fields before ending up creating the team responsible for quality management at Leroy Merlin. Since that project was a success, and with the emergence of platform mode operation, he was asked to contribute that team to the whole Adeo group.

While load testing was gaining traction in the company, limitations from the usual tool, were found and prevented an easy growth:

• 5 parallel runs limitation, that could only be upgraded through a very expensive license modification,
• Floating licensing policy which only allowed 5000 concurrent Vus for the entire company,
• Load tests duration capped at 8 hours,
• Insufficient resources on the load generators (2CPU / 8Gb Ram),
• The lack of a strong relationship with the tool’s support team.

All those limitations pushed ADEO to begin the process of acquiring a new tool.

Finding the right tool

Following a study of the load testing market, 5 solutions were initially selected :

• Octoperf
• K6
• Neoload
• Keeping Blazemeter
• A homemade solution

All solutions were evaluated and compared using the same criteria (more than 20).

Octoperf scored on several requirements :

• User-friendly interface, which allowed to perform the entire load testing campaign on a single interface,
• Cheap licensing models, with no “floating” Virtual Users system. Which meant that any user in the company could launch the maximum allowed number of users at any time,
• Reactive support, which answers in less than 10 minutes to any enquiry in the embedded chat,
• Easier script migration since Octoperf, as Blazemeter, is based on the JMeter engine.

An extensive POC was, with the support of Octoperf’s technical team, deemed a success and Octoperf was selected.

Onboarding

The next steps consisted in:

• Migrating the 250 scripts and 500 test scenarios from the usual product to Octoperf,
• Share the new product, Octoperf in the company and start the onboarding process.

Thomas Pitteman communicated around the value creation of a new solution for ADEO. Some teams were using their own choice of tools. Octoperf seems to offer seamless experience in its usage.

To help with the onboarding process, on top of the existing Octoperf documentation, Thomas Pitteman drafted tailor-made tutorials for Adeo’s use case. A course given by one of Octoperf’s technical expert was also organized, which allowed a core team of users to master the main concepts of the tools, so that they would share it with other users.

All those steps were achieved in 6 months, the Adeo’s Octoperf platform is now used by more than 300 users, and more than 6000 tests were launched during that time.

Future Steps

In the following months, Thomas and Marc will work on making the Octoperf load testing community grow even larger at Adeo internationally.

They will also continue to share feedbacks in order to improve the solution, by submitting new features requests that will make the tool even more tailored to their needs, and will also be beneficial to the entire Octoperf community.