The Feature That Made All the Difference for One Master Tester

At SmartBear, we create software for software developers and testers. It’s definitely an interesting space to work. Unlike most software companies, our customers are not lay people who don’t really know how software works and take for granted how it runs their daily lives. Our customers create the stuff, and all of us at SmartBear interact with them in some way or another.

As a result, we’re immersed in all kinds of software industries, and we see this stuff everywhere—when we watch the news, when we consider traveling overseas, when we look into schools for our kids. We think, write and talk about software everyday; and realize it’s an underlying fabric of modern life, one that is blooming and spreading faster and faster across the earth and creating entirely new capacities for human interaction. We know that the future of software is inexorably linked with the future of human civilization as a whole.

Yeah, we’re in deep.

Also, because our customers are software developers and testers, we get to learn from them nearly everyday. Sometimes they even teach us things about our own tools that we didn’t know! That happened recently with a feature of WebLoadUI Pro, our premier load testing tool for Web applications.

Here’s the story…

I attended StarEAST with some of my colleagues a few weeks ago, and this guy (who I won’t name but is somewhat of a celebrity in the testing world) started talking with Mike Punsky about WebLoadUI Pro. Now, Mike probably knows that tool better than anyone. But, because he is a bit biased to SmartBear load testing tools, he hasn’t used many others.

The very smart man then began explaining to Mike how one of our features saves him hours of prep time compared to the other enterprise level tools out there. Of course, we thought that was very cool, especially because we didn’t even know that this feature was unique to our tool.

He was referring to the “custom shape load profile” feature that allows you to hand shape or draw a load profile. Normally, in a pre-deploy testing situation, even an experienced load tester will spend hours studying the traffic patterns of similar Web applications in order to mimic them in a load test. Or, if the Web application has already been launched, the tester will study the actual trends of that application, but alter them in testing scenarios to see what would happen if the traffic increased – something any viable business should prepare for.

In order to gain the most accurate prediction of how a Web application will perform, it’s important to reproduce a scenario in load testing that mirrors real life situations. Here’s where the (sometimes) hours of data crunching comes in, and where Mike realized that WebLoadUI Pro saves testers not only lots of time but plenty of head aches too.

We know many passionate software testers who realize the importance of their work, but we don’t know any who actually enjoy the tedious task of inputting countless data points into a spreadsheet to try and mimic a load profile curve. That’s what the custom shaped load profile tool does for you. You just edit the shape to match what you’ve realized is the curve you want. Instead of hours or minutes, it takes a matter of seconds!

Seeing the relief this simple feature gave to one of the most professional and respected testers we know is exactly what makes all of us at SmartBear rejoice. It not only makes his job far less tedious, it frees him up to focus on the quality of his software. Victory all around!

The custom shape load profile feature is one of the perks of WebLoadUI Pro, which has more functionality and support than our free version, WebLoadUI.

But if budget is an issue for you (and, let’s be honest, it usually is), go ahead try out the basics of the tool for free by downloading WebLoadUI.

We love to hear stories about how our tools are being used by testers and developers alike. I especially like interviewing people and posting their videos on the SmartBear blog. We welcome everyone from experts who may have recently written a book to new developers and testers just getting started. Let me know in the comment section if you’d like to be featured on our blog!