Marie Cruz, a Developer Advocate at k6, explores the hybrid approach to performance testing at Testμ 2023, emphasizing its importance in ensuring optimal web performance by addressing both front-end and back-end systems. While back-end performance testing focuses on infrastructure aspects such as scalability, elasticity, and resilience, front-end testing examines user experience metrics like loading times and interactivity. Cruz highlights that traditional testing often overlooks the front-end, which is responsible for 80-90% of user response time, making a holistic hybrid approach essential. This approach combines browser and protocol-level testing using tools like k6 to simulate real-world conditions, offering a comprehensive view of application performance. Cruz discusses the advantages and challenges of both testing types, noting that a hybrid method effectively bridges the gap, enabling early detection of potential issues and enhancing user experience. The session also touches on practical applications of k6, including database load testing extensions and efforts to align its capabilities with the Playwright API for improved user journey replication.