Performance Testing….Expensive ??..THINK AGAIN !

Massive change in last couple of years

Gone are the days, when companies needed a heavy budget to go for Performance Testing. The licensed tools were a dream for smaller clients who did not have enough in their kitty to pay for performance testing. As a result, the most they would do is perform some developer level / component level performance testing using enterprise developer tools that would have a plugin for performance testing and certify that the software looks stable.The same code goes to production and looks stable for a couple of weeks, teams give a pat on their back and celebrate success. However during the peak season, everyone seems to be on their toes worried about the business impact just in case their systems just do not scale up with heavy traffic.

Something goes wrong and firefighting begins, teams get into war rooms, decide next steps and suggest we need to go for an expensive Licensed Performance Test Tool, Performance Test Resources, and we should be covered for next year. It all starts with procuring the tool and then looking for an equally able resource to implement the test process. The price you pay, goes up exponentially as you pay for the tool and also the resource who is an expert in using it with several years of experience. If that is not enough, a certified training for other interested candidates who want to build a career in performance testing. Hereby another client gives up to the world of heavily price licensed tools.

Open Source serves my purpose 

Over recent years, there has been a paradigm shift in Performance Testing especially when it comes to costing. Several Open source tools provide just about enough features (if not more!) to help smaller clients (as well as bigger clients) test their software. Having worked in this field for almost 10 years now, my view is that the tools also work on the famous 80-20 rule. 80 % of the price you pay for a tool is for the 20% of the features that you DO NOT use! Using Open Source and with Cloud infrastructure available on demand, you do not have to worry about paying heavy price for the hardware. A lot of open source tools have tied up with 3rd parties to give a web interface that will just allow you to run your tests from mobile and you do not have to worry about your Network firewall and other access issues.

Yes, everybody can ! 

There is no doubt about the price worthy capabilities of these tools (I personally am a BIG fan of them!), but not being able to afford these is not the end of the world. You still could invest smartly and cover lot of performance related risks to your software by using variety of open source tools.

 Keep reading this space for more…