[textile]
The most popular content on this site seems to be Anthony's comparison between *OpenSTA* and *LoadRunner*. I'm not surprised - Mercury's *LoadRunner* is the most popular tool in this space, but no company is hated more by it's user base. The first and prime responsibility for this anomalous situation must be borne by Mercury's corporate licensing department. A more hostile consumer licensing policy does not exist.
Imagine buying a car from Ford. Nice looks, good mileage, great reviews, everything. Before you sign a cheque in favour of the dealer, he tells you there are a few "rules". These rules are as follows:
- The car may only be driven on certain roads.
- You may not carry anything inside the car except yourself.
- Under no situation may you lift the bonnet of your own car.
You'd freak out, perhaps launch into a rage or even laugh your a** off. The comparison with a car is just about right too. To paraphrase iTestSolutions'
James Pulley, Mercury LR costs north of a fully loaded Mercedes S-Class Sedan! And this is just the base version with the controller and 100 users!
Additionally, the licensing policy stipulates that:
- The product may only be used for a single customer for a single project!
- Adding to the product may annul the license validity!
- You may not install it on a computer to which there is remote access!
Rhetorical Q: How is this reasonable? As consumers why must we put up with such nonsense?
The alternative freeware solution needs to have the following characterestics:
|_. Feature|_. Strategy|
(dark). |Support for multiple protocols and not just HTTP/S|This may be achieved in part by building a tool that does the basics - provides a scripting language like VBA, has a controller-like interface, generic implementation of a recording engine and a protocol addition interface.|
(dark). |Analysis|Analysis is becoming more of a statistical challenge - how difficult would it be for a company like
Wolfram - makers of Mathematica to stray into this field. They'd do a far better job, not to mention bring more mathematical rigour into the field.|
(dark). |Active Developer Community|Again, this is something the
OpenSTA world had at one point in time. One would think this should have been simpler, given the fact that the performance testing world has a large number of programmer-test engineers.|
(dark). |Active Publishing Community|How come there is no book on the market titled "
Silk Performer for Dummies" or "
The Complete Idiot's Guide to LoadRunner"? Microsoft has a rather active book community. You can walk into a shop in ABC (Appa Balwant Chowk) in Pune City and pick up books on everthing from Visual C++ to Microsoft Project. You have to hand it to Microsoft - they have done a sterling job here. Mercury simply stonewalls authors - atleast that has been my experience with my book proposal.|
It may well be possible to stitch together freeware/cheaper tools from the monitoring space(
HostMonitor?), the Load generation space (
OpenSTA?) and the Analysis space(
Mathematica?) to take on MI LR.
*Prediction, mine*: We are going to see a consolidation of tools (vendor-vendor JVs or acquisitions) in the performance testing space. The market is growing rapidly and this is a money spinner to the tune of over $1 billion (Figure from 2001 market research). Maybe the competition to LR from
Segue and
IBM-Rational may join hands to do just this.
