First of all Thanks very much for your useful post.
I would like to introduce another good blog which is having free software testing ebooks and technical content, Have a look.

Let me know about your hack day, I’d be interested…

Cheers,
Tim

I’m going to get a fuller response to this on my blog. Let me know if you want to organise a hack day to start work on a simple tool.

Despite this blog’s grievances towards commercial load testing tools, I acknowledge that they’ve kept me employed for the last 5 years consulting as a performance tester. Please don’t be put off by them.

I don’t think the frustrations are reflective of the environments I’ve worked in. The people I’ve worked with have been great and I’ve loved the challenge each different workplace offers. The frustrations lies more with an ageing toolset which hasn’t really kept pace with the maturing software testing field in general.

Also, bigger is not necessarily better! Some of the most enjoyable work I’ve done has been with very small teams. Be sure to consider Conway’s law! [1]. However if you’re looking for experience and variety in terms of protocols tested with, larger team sizes etc then I strongly encourage you to consider the role on the other side of Australia =)

Regards,
Tim

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway’s_Law

Thank you for your articles on performance testing, I have found them very enlightening but the last one is strangely daunting.

Let me explain, you see I have recently applied for a position where I belive you have worked in the recent past. I have heard of your expertise from many people yet you seem very frustrated.

I would have thought that a national institution hosting one of the largest performance test teams in Australia would be a great place for a budding newbie performance tester to really see how the big end of town goes about its business.

I am thinking of moving from Perth and will take only a small paycut from my permanent position. Can you please confirm that it will be a wonderfully rewarding experience for me??

Yours
Budd

It would be nice to spend less time scripting and more time analysing performance results… Stay tuned for more open source alternatives in the near future!

“You’ll go cross-eyed looking at test plans in xml”

LOL

I’ve worked with these tools and I agree with you Tim, there are a lot of features to add to the performance tools. I think the next step is to combine the automation tools like Watir or Selenium with performance tools to make it easier the task to create performance scenarios and we “humans with brains and experience” can make a deeper analyze of the results.

Best Regards.

José

Also interesting about HTML-Mode. We are using that here but web_submit_forms are not being recorded, only web_submit_data which I’m not sure why. (We use HTML-based scripts with HTML advanced as ‘a script describing user actions (e.g. web_ink, web_submit_form). I use web_link whenever I can because that is definitely easier. Shame you can’t pass in regex to the string match parameters.

Also web_click, I think you’re talking about the Click and Script protocol which costs more money, and I haven’t heard enough good (anecdotal) advice to switch to that.

I’ll leave ANSI C for you to enjoy

Watir, is defiantly the way to go, although I don’t have much experience in the open source tools you mention, its clear to see that open source is the peoples software, we make the changes and enhancements that WE want. Instead of waiting for the big wigs to help us out.

Hopefully this will flush out the fakers in the industry…but selling performance testing as an easy job makes it harder for us….I heard someone once say “when will LR release an auto analyse tool” – I decided to walk away.

Good article Koop.