We often hear great things about open-source tools. And, with good reason. Open-source tools allow for customization: when you need a specific aspect of how your application behaves, they allow you to develop custom functions and behaviors to make your application correspond to your expectations.
They’re publicly accessible, easy to modify and share, and above all else, “free.” Without licensing fees required, open-source load testing tools seem to be a good answer when testers are facing tight budget.
In a fast-paced industry where agility and time to market are crucial fuel sources of business growth, the ability to innovate through flexible technology is a requirement. The use of open-source tools make it possible to leverage the technology behind the innovation which hasn’t always been enabled by closed-source alternatives.
In the past 10+ years, the industry has witnessed an explosion in the number of open-source technologies and projects which continue to shape today’s paradigm of application development in the mobile, cloud, and big data era. If you’ve never considered open-source performance testing before, and just now getting around to it, we’d like to share some questions you should ask yourself to aid your evaluation:
- Are you sure open-source will allow you to reach the same level of test coverage as proprietary tools do?
- Are you sure license/support costs are the only budget impediments associated with implementing the open-source tool? Do you really know what are the budgets you will need beyond the upfront costs? Do you prefer to pay someone to upkeep your open-source tools for you ? Or dedicating the necessary time to upkeep it yourself?
- Are you sure you will develop the skills available to implement these tools quickly; Will you really know how good their experience is before a technical problem presents that is beyond the tool’s ability to assist you in fixing?
- Do you need a professional tech support by a dedicated team rolling out specific new features that customers are asking for, or are you able to wait for the open-source communities to develop the tool you need? Can you be sure that this newly developed tool will perfectly match your expectations?
Make no mistake, open-source tools can be valuable to the business. We just want to make sure you’re taking a holistic approach when determining whether this is right for you and your long-term budget. Indeed, even if there isn’t an upfront cost, over time, you will need to pay for development, implementation, and maintenance.
As a trusted Neotys business change consultancy partner, Certeco, has written a very informative blog perspective designed to help organizations address these very questions – all in the name of helping validate whether open-source is for you. The piece includes a side-by-side comparison with JMeter, an open-source alternative to NeoLoad.
Through arguments such as the time-savings associated with initial script creation, out-of-the-box proxy recording capability and flexible licensing, Certeco asserts the features/benefits of NeoLoad as a solid competitive approach. Ultimately, you own the decision re: what’s right for your organization. Certeco is only trying to help provide some questions to think about as you decide.