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As a test consultant working in all areas of automated testing (as opposed to manual 'tick the box' testing) - I do most of my Load or Stress Testing using the industry standard tool LoadRunner. I've used all other load testing tools and this is by far the best (albeit pretty expensive) but for large scale commercial projects - nothing even comes close.

Also, if you want to impress management, go look at some Mercury tools and get time reading about them. I don't know if you can get a demo for training for them, but WinRunner will really save testers (and then Management, of course) time in Regression testing. Another great website for testers is Sticky Minds. There you will find references to all the books your mind can eat up. Good luck!

Some of the demand on IT is routine but high volume, such as service requests, software defects, new employee provisioning, and project issues. Other demand is more complex and strategic, such as requests for new applications to support business initiatives. Mercury Demand Management (formerly Kintana Demand Manager) supports your complete management lifecycle for both types of demand. With Mercury Interactive, you prioritize with visibility, enabling your business users and IT to collaborate efficiently at every step, cutting costs and accelerating resolution.

When you use Mercury Demand Management, you no longer need multiple point tools for service requests, software defects, project issues, and strategic initiatives. And unlike traditional help desk applications, Mercury Demand Management provides you with a start-to-finish solution that also automates resource scheduling, demand fulfillment, and service level measurement. Finally, Mercury Interactive's consolidated view of IT demand ensures your most important business priorities are supported.

• - Consolidate all demand on IT

• - Manage complete IT demand lifecycle

• - Manage status, service levels, and trends

Bosses don't know what you've been doing the whole time is BTO, "Business Technology Optimization".
Bosses love acronyms... Bosses LOVE acronyms with the words "Business", "Technology" and "Optimization" in them.
And you get some more cool hardware to play with in cause of 'saving money'...

Checking links and so on
Try Mercury's Astra Quick Test which is a free download for a limited subset of protocols, but is useful for checking dead links automatically.

Performance Testing Web Applications
We use Mercury to test massive ebusiness applications -- on the scale of a large UK bank. We have 7 people who work on LoadRunner all the time.

For recording and replaying simple processes, LoadRunner is fine. There are some quirks, though, that can really upset testing -- like if a developer uses non-standard technologies: like ScriptX controls. LoadRunner also gets upset at things like gzipping content.

The biggest issue we have is making sure data from a large number of systems is in line with each other and fed into LoadRunner in the right way.

We have looked at other tools (like Segue Silk Performer) but they seemed to be slightly behind LoadRunner.

The quality of LoadRunner isn't too great, there are numerous crashes (v. frustrating) and 'features' that crop up in the middle of testing. We keep around 0.5 of a version behind the current offering which is pretty stable and has the problems ironed out.

Mercury can be buggers about licencing: once you buy, say, 1000 Virtual users for the Web, you can't swap them for Oracle. Mercury also insist on using dongles which limits the amount of simultaneous testing performed. At the moment we pay around £70k for 100 VUsers and a dongle. We also have to pay 20% per year in Maintainance -- although Tech. Support in the UK isn't too great.

I've used both JMeter and Siege and liked the results (fairly accurate, easy to use, scriptable). I've discussed some of the high cost solutions such as offerings from Mercury Interactive[mecuryinteractive.com] with developers I trust, and the concensus seems to be that if you use several of the testing tools avialable, grab some humans at the same time to check the URL, and take all of the results with a grain of salt, you'll be better off than spending beaucoup bucks on Mercury Interactive, or similar tools. (Note: I have never worked for Mercury Interactive, or used their tools) Also, I have tried the Micro$oft tool, I thought it sucked, but I'm an open source biased individual... :)

Good luck!

My company uses WinRunner for Windows GUI testing. I know that Mercury Interactive which makes WinRunner and LoadRunner another GUI Testing utility creates Unix version of their software in addition to the Windows versions. I don't know about Mac though.
Mercury Interactive
Hope that helps
Joe

Check this out for some pretty reasonable X-windows testing. Heard quite a few positive things about it.

This placeclaims to do that sort of thing, though I've never used it myself.

So I guess there are even non-political, ethical justifications for DoS attacks.

Moreso, isn't DoS precisely what companies like Mercury Interactive and Keynote do when they try to slam your webserver so you know whether you need to buy more server processing power, etc.?

::Colz Grigor
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