Forgive this somewhat off-topic posting, or is it? I probably should have read the posting guidelines first. Here is a JMeter success story.
I was recently consulting to a major corporation in the financial services industry and was tasked with making some seemingly minor functional changes to a web service system that had not been maintained for several years. Since there was no test for the web service, I used JMeter to write a functional / regression test to essentially capture the current behavior of the system. As I made changes, I would use the JMeter test to validate that everything was still working properly. Then, just for sh-ts and giggles, I ran the test with three threads - and two of them failed. Right about the same time I discovered this, the load on the company's production server went up and they started experiencing failures, leading to a potential major business loss. As you could imagine, this escalated right to the top and I suddenly transitioned from working on a relatively minor functional change to saving customers and business. With JMeter I was able to find the cause of the bug and prove that I had a fix, and then use it in the test and production environments to validate that the fix worked. I anticipate other people at this company will now be using JMeter on a fairly regular basis, for testing web applications in addition to the web services I was testing. One interesting area for me is that JMeter is, at heart, a really good load testing tool with a descent functional testing capability. I was using it primarily for functional testing at first (not load testing), and it was there that I ran into a limitation, which is that you can't use JMeter to automate the functional test of a Windows application. That's by design, I'm not criticizing that - JMeter isn't designed to test Windows applications - I understand that. So I worked around that by using the Java sampler to bridge in another open source testing tool that can create automated functional tests for Windows applications. That wasn't really necessary because I could have done the same thing without requiring the Windows application, I was just doing that to see if it would work really, and whether it would be valuable. I did actually find it valuable in a few places, when I wanted to do some Windows application thing in the middle of a test. I'm not sure I'd use that Windows bridge on another project, but it was an interesting research effort nevertheless. David
