Thoughts about LoadRunner 12 Release
There is a lot of discussions around about HP LoadRunner 12 release – including posts of Scott Moore (@loadtester ) and Richard Bishop ( @Richardbishop ). And Richard asked me on Twitter: “I think #LoadRunner 12 is a game changer for HP. What do you think?” Well, here is what I think – I don’t want to limit my response by 140 symbols.
No, I don’t think that it is “a game changer” for HP – but I don’t think that it is “too little, too late” either. It is somewhere in the middle. It might be “too little, too late” if not the unique position LoadRunner has on the load testing market – but if we factor in market realities, it is definitely a bold move that will make it much more difficult for competitors to extend their beachhead into the corporate market.
And actually I see only one thing as actually drastic: community edition with 50 free users. It definitely should boost LoadRunner popularity and will support its reputation as an industry standard (which started to crumble). I guess it will cannibalize some profit – but it is definitely an important step to keep LoadRunner relevant.
All other changes sound rather incremental. Nothing else jumped out at me as something that I may name a “game changer”.
Cloud-based load generators for AWS only? Come on. That, of course, eliminates one complain about LoadRunner. But it was long overdue. What year SOASTA introduced CloudTest with the same? 2008? What year Neotys started to support it? Blazemeter built a business around running JMeter scripts in cloud. So it took 6 years for HP to copy some competitors’ functionality? I can’t name it impressive.
Saying that changes are incremental I am not saying that they are not important – I am sure that many people using specific features were waiting for them. Neither I want to say that LoadRunner is outdated and behind competition (as it often its competitors want to present). Even if we forget about support of non-web protocols – LoadRunner is still ahead of competition in many areas. Many people don’t even realize how much functionality is there – and how difficult would be to do load testing without it when you need it. Of course, if you test plain HTML, you may live happily without all that – but when you have a zoo of products and technologies to test, as most corporations do, you need all that sophistication.
So LoadRunner 12 changes the game. Not drastically – but certainly a noticeable change. And, by the way, it confirms that we have a serious game now – and even HP started to react. I don’t think that this community edition were possible if HP didn’t feel a real threat to its position.
Actually for a long time load testing was a very quiet field – not much was happening there (well, many who wrote a simple test harness tried to market it as a load testing tool – but you need much more to make a real impact on market). And now we see a lot happening there – with many new and serious competitors. It is tough for vendors – but definitely good for the community.
