LoadRunner 9.0 - A Review of What's New

LoadRunner 9.0 is released, debugged and ready to sere the needs of performance testers. It's been out there since August, but had some "issues" that are reportedly fixed. So let's take a look and see what we get!

New Features

The best improvement in VUGen is the most basic and simple - we finally have a FIND feature!
The most notable in VuGen is the user defined Business Process Report in Microsoft Word format, that summarizes the VuGen script for various protocols including the infamous and troublesome Citrix_ICA. This works well, but text would have been a far choice since this is to be a template that is reusable and Word adds extra formatting codes you are going to have to hunt down and get rid of before you can actually use this.

In the Controller, a new scheduler is available with a GUI to actually see the firing off of Vusers to that schedule. This is a help for when you are in the process of taking down a server, you can show it visually to the impacted team with little explanation necessary. One less meeting is always good in testing.

New Functions

Five star new function, IMHO, is at long last, the support for RDP testing with a run time viewer! Now if we could only get the application itself to run with VNC and RDP it would be great!

For you Citrix fans, the new ctrx_execute_on_window function (replaces ctrx_set_exeption) provides for the use if wildcard characters in the window caption, less scripting for you!

The SLA Wizard gives you the opportunity to define performance metrics against established SLAs. Purely a business reporting tool that will help when it is analysis and reporting time, Loadrunner will go out and perform the measurements for you and report them on demand. A great time saver if you are in regression performance testing mode. Works well, I had no issue getting the metrics I asked for even when the SLAs were not possible (negative numbers).

Improved

Java support has been improved, we now have JMS (for Weblogic 8.1, Websphere MQ 6.0 and TIBCO EMS), JACADA and the ability to add custom as always.

Still needs work

The RMI support still needs work if we are going to use it without winsockets. I know the technology is old school, but we have tons of legacy apps alive and well that use this function.

Visual Studio integration is still not quite there. You will find some of the old errors and mis configurations still exist.



=============================================

Citrix

Citrix Vuser scripts emulate the Citrix ICA protocol communication between a Citrix client and server.

Improved script replay stability and predictability.
New bitmap synchronization replay error management compares bitmap synchronization errors as they occur, and adds the necessary changes to the the script in a single click.
Improved text trapping and text synchronization algorithm, including showing the synchronization area in a snapshot.
Improved tree view, including replay snapshots and additional options in the context menu.
New ctrx_execute_on_window function (replaces ctrx_set_exeption) enables usage of wildcard characters (*) in the window caption.
Supports Metaframe server 3.0 and Metaframe server 4.0
Supports Citrix client 9.x and 10.0

WAP

Supports recording using the new multi-protocol mechanism.
Records any type of WAP application/simulator.
VuGen automatically recognizes the application/simulator settings and uses them during recording.
Supports WSP, HTTP proxy, and HTTP direct modes as configured in the application/simulator.

Winsocket

Added support for SSL and UDP.

Mailing Services

Added SSL support for LDAP, FTP, POP3, SMTP & IMAP protocols.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Add-In

Full support for creating, replaying, and debugging scripts from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 - C#, VB.NET or C++.

Agile and Free to Learn Tools in the Dot Net Arena

Agile development and test have finally arrived in the .dotNet programming environment, just as the open source movement has entered into the commercial development of Microsoft and some other top tier software organizations. Typically, dotNet has been solely a development tool with very few quality tools to speak of in any real terms. Quality teams have been almost isolated and collaboration between development and quality assurance are tenuous at best, which is quite the standard in traditional development environments. There is now an opportunity emerging with the launch of Visual Studio 8.0 to a more agile and cooperative team environment.

Development tools for building both desktop and team-based enterprise Web applications are standard for this and many other IDE’s on the market. What this release has to offer is providing the testers the ability to collaborate and fine tune those applications in real and measurable terms. Testers have available to them a complete studio of tools in the Test Edition of Visual Studio 8.0 that are integrated into the development environment including unit, Web, load, manual and code coverage tests. In the past, the use of the Web Application Stress Tool was the only opportunity in this space for configurable load and performance testing of applications. While this tool was effective, it did take a fair amount of expertise in the tool itself as well as load testing in general. This was time consuming and did not lend itself to rapid development and as such, was relegated to the luxury bin and rarely performed well, if at all. Much of the guesswork and pain of learning a new tool is alleviated in a familiar interface and standard toolbars in this tool.

The challenges facing quality assurance in the testing of web based applications has been addressed with the advent of the WebTesting namespace that provides specific classes to enable Web testing. The base class for all web tests is the WebTest class, which is available out-of-the-box as are the classes WebTestRequest and WebTestResponse classes for simulating HTTP requests and responses. Gone are the days of hand coding tests for http responses and posts, this is now a point and click operation with an expert view if you feel so inclined.

Building and testing high-performing desktop applications in a simple team-based design enables swift and high quality applications and deployment of enterprise solutions. Add the ability to communicate and provide to the development team valid and reproducible errors seamlessly and you have the pure divinity of agile. The opportunity to learn the functionality of this tool are available at no cost on the educational portion of the developer network site called channel 8, also known as DreamSpark to students everywhere. You can download the tools below at no cost: Channel 8, DreamSpark, Test Center 90 day Trial Download.