JMeter introduction presentation for Israeli audience

Last week I was one of the speakers in the Israeli Agile QA conference 2012, in front of more than 200 people from the Israeli QA industry.
Most of the speakers were very self-advertising about the products or services they offer.

On the other hand - I have nothing to sell but to spread the word about the changes coming to the load testing area, as I have the feeling that the Israeli market is really under-estimating JMeter as a product for load testing. This market controlled by HP load runner, completely.

This is changing worldwide - but in Israel we are living in some delay.

JMeter introduction presentation for Israeli audience

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I started my presentation with the need for load testing, shared some key reasons to drive us into load testing as well as sharing some of the last couple of weeks crash stories for Israeli and world wide web sites and services, mentioning Golan Telecom, Le'an Israeli online ticketing service and Blizzard's Diablo 3 online service.

I talked about how load testing can be done:

1. Manual load testing - which is self explaining, and while asking how many people did this in the past - I saw more than 30 hands raised, while asking how many of them did this during the last year about half of the hands remained in the air.
2. Then I talked about HP Load Runner, asking who heard about it and got almost all hands of the crowed (very good job for HP's sales department!). Mentioning the fact the on early 90's they came with their game-changing product to allow load testing for many popular protocols. Since then the two most popular protocols which are really being used among the huge list of protocols are HTTP and Citrix. Cons: You need $$$ before you can even start thinking of load testing with this product and the fact that you will almost always end up needing to write scripts in C language + special functions they came up with in the early 90's.
3. Now I've started to talk about JMeter, which is free, open source, you can sell it as it is to anyone and so on... and one of the important points was that the "J" in JMeter doesn't mean that this is a product for Java load testing, as usually J prefixed products do, but it only means that JMeter is written in Java and it suitable for load testing any of the supported protocols, no matter what the underlying platform is.

Later I exposed some interesting numbers from Indeed.com about jobs offering in the USA in the last years, showing a huge trend in JMeter's popularity - if about 7 years ago there was 1 JMeter job post, today there is 140 job posts! While on the same time, Load Runner popularity remained about the same, with a growth of about 20%.

The interesting fact is that JMeter is not taking over Load Runner jobs market, but it is actually making the load testing market (or the total number of jobs posted) bigger.

I then talked about the very near future with anticipating that until the end of this year (2012) there will be more JMeter job posting than Load Runner, in the USA.

As the last motivator - I talked about the doom of Load Runner, showing numbers about the popularity of Borland C, saying that if nothing big will happen with Load Runner, its popularity will look like Borland C in the next very few years.

Later I gave a ten minutes demo about how easy is to start with JMeter, making an example recording of few actions in the new web site of Golan Telecom, allowing people to join this new Israeli Cellular Network, online.

I also talked shortly about BlazeMeter, an Israeli start up utilizing JMeter to allow easily load testing with JMeter from several locations using Amazon AWS.

At last, I spoke about how to start using JMeter - referring to google for JMeter :)