I wanted to know if there are any open source tool for load testing any web application.
Is LoadRunner a perfect tool from an enterprise perspective for this purpose?
Could you clarify your question a bit? Are you looking to take the queries generated by the web application and then to reproduce them with a performance testing tool directly against the database or are you looking to exercise the web app and then analyze the database?
As far as what is best, this is a very subjective item and it comes back to that most dangerous of concepts, "requirements." The requirements for one organization may point the way to one tool over another depending upon the technical needs of the application, the available skills within the existing/planned performance testing team and budget. Mercury certainly made the case for the ROI for LoadRunner on the enterprise level long before it became part of HP's software offerings with market responding by giving it the largest overall market share. However, as evidenced by it's non-monopoly position the requirements of other organizations have lead to the adoption of different tools.
Build your requirements; technical, skills required and business; then evaluate the various market offerings to see which one works for you. The more interfaces you add the more compelling a commercial tool becomes over an open source one. The greater your skills depth in your performance team the more flexibility you have in using an open source tool as you will need to build out some of the analytical pieces that a commercial tool includes by default. ...
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Traditional categorization of processes is talking about integration, human centric and document centric processes, with the last one as a good candidate for placing inside the DMS system (of course, the prerequisite is that there is a built-in support for BPM).
But I was unable to find some concrete,more detailed explanation of the distinction between those options.
Imagine a company, that have Enterprise BPM solution , and also a DMS system with quite good support for BPM (i.e. Filenet DMS).
In both systems you can create user screens and workflows (process logic) as well.
Also, most processes working with documents are also quite "human-centric".
I am perfectly aware of the fact, that choosing the target platform always depends on the requirements and specific circumstances, but I wonder, if there are some general rules, or principles, based on which I can better decide where to put the process layer of the whole solution.
Additional clarification:
I don't want to implement any new platform. As I indicated a little bit in the previous post, we already have BPM platform (Oracle) and DMS as well (Filenet with BPM support - Case Foundation). So the question is not about choosing the new platform...but more about setting the rules for using the existing products/platforms. There are a lot new projects in the queue...and for some of them (that are touching the area of working with documents) we need to decide the target platform/s. For example, when you have a simple process with a few steps, and in all steps there is some work with an existing document (the document - or at least his original version, is also input to this process), the requirements on the front-end are not very complicated etc...it would simpler to build the whole solution in the Filenet platform( mostly because of the cost). But I am wondering if there are some similar rules....Like you should think about that or that... when you want use only the DMS platform...or both platforms etc. You can call these rules the principles for development, references architectures or something like that....that is guiding you when designing the target architecture/s.
Thank you
I'm reposting the answer because I don't see a reason for deletion (by #Bohemian).
I think it adds value to anyone asking the same question. #Bohemian could have at least specified why he deleted the post.
Here it goes:
You gave us rather small amount of information. And what exactly is
the question? What do you mean by "where to put the process layer"?
You shouldn't constrain yourself to only those DM systems that claim
to have BPM built-in. That's marketing speak behind which often lay
two half-baked products. You should instead question which
standards-based integration points the system has, so you can
integrate effortlessly. And then invest in best-of-breed DM and best
BPM separately. All-in-one solutions are often too closed, difficult
to extend and above all, they bring free vendor-lock-in with them.
What are your business requirements, i.e. what do you have to do?
Implement BPM inside organization that already has DM or not? Do you
have some BPM platform already? Do you have any
constraints/requirements when choosing either of those (vendor,
technology foundation, Gartner quadrant...)?
What are the options you're considering for DM and which options are
you evaluating (if any) as a BPM platform? Have you already settled on
IBM or you can go elsewhere? Is open source an option?
What is your role/responsibility in this project?
EDIT - after the author's clarifications:
I have not worked with Oracle's BPM, but I can tell you that, although Case Foundation is more suited to Case Management, you can develop a complete Process Management solution with it (workflows, tasks, roles, deadlines, in-baskets, etc.).
If you go that path and later come across the business need to allow business users to define their own case templates, take a look at IBM Case Manager, as it builds on top of Case Foundation, but also brings additional WebUI features (built on IBM Content Navigator), suitable for business users (although, more often than not, it turns out the IT does that job).
A few IBM redbooks about Case & Content management that might help you make an informed decision:
Introducing IBM FileNet Business Process Manager - this is the former name for Case Foundation - the same product, new version.
Advanced Case Management with IBM Case Manager
Customizing and Extending IBM Content Navigator - you'll need this one for customizations, if you decide to go with CF (instead of Oracle).
Building IBM Enterprise Content Management Solutions From End to End - from ingestion to case/process management (contains Case Manager).
I agree with #Robert regarding integration, after all, before version 5.2 FileNet Content Platform Engine was FN Content Engine + FN Process Engine.
The word of advice I can give you is to first document all features that business requires from BPM. Then do a due diligence on both products, noting down which of those features each of those products supports. Then the answer, if not laid out in front of you, will at least be much easier.
You also have to take into account that IBM is oriented towards IBM BPM (former Lombardi) when process management is concerned. Former FN BPM is now more pushed into Case Management (but those two are very similar paradigms).
You should definitely post back about your experience, whichever option you choose.
Good "luck" :)
We've got an Excel spreadsheet floating around right now (globally) at my company to capture various pieces of information about each countries technology usage. The problem is that it goes out, gets changes, but they're never obvious, and often conflicting - and then we have to smash them together. To me, the workbook is no more than a garbage in/garbage out type application waiting to be written.
In a company that has enough staff and knowledge to dedicate to Enterprise projects, for some reason, agile and language/frameworks such as Rails, Grails, etc. are frowned upon. That said, I can't help but think that this is almost a perfect fit for the need, given the scaffolding features for extremely simple implementations of capturing raw fields with only a couple lookups (i.e. a pre-defined category). I'm thinking this would be considered a very appropriate use of these frameworks.
Has anyone worked on these types of quick and dirty apps before in normally large-scale, heavy-handed enterprise environments with success? Any tips for communicating this need/appropriateness to non-technical management?
The only way to get this implemented in a rigid organization is to get this working and demo it -- without approval. It's very hard for management to say no to a finished project.
I work for a really big company & have written many utility apps based on Rails (as well as contributed to some larger Rails projects). That said, the biggest concern is not the quality of the app, but who's going to support/maintain it when you leave or get hit by the bus.
IMHO, The major fear that an enterprise organization has - especially if the application becomes more critical to it's core business - is how to support it. If it doesn't fit into it's neat little box of supported technologies, it's less likely to happen.
Corporations have been bitten by this many times in the past & are cautious when bringing in new technology.
So, if you can drum up more folks to learn Ruby/Rails in your group (or elsewhere in your company), you may be able to make a good case for it. Otherwise, sad to say, your probably better off implementing something on Sharepoint :-(.
If you already have a Java infrastructure, then creating a Grails app will require little to no additional IT ramp up to support and maintain. The support and maintenance cost and effort should be the same as for a Java application (i.e. Grails apps run on Tomcat, use the same JVM, use the same diagnostic/profiling tools, etc.).
In my experience, larger IT organizations have a harder time supporting Ruby when its not already in the toolchain because its a new language, new deployment environment, and requires a considerable amount of support and maintenance ramp up.
I would develop a minimal viable product, then make friends with someone in IT who can help you deploy it into a staging or production environment. Then get a few of the users to hop on board and test it like its a Beta product. After that, open it up to a larger audience.
So as others have said, forgiveness over permission, but be smart about the impact on the IT organization.
Has anybody been in or has seen a kind of "Surgical Team" as described in The Mythical Man Month? Have you heard of somebody actually implementing "Mill's Proposal"?
There is a lot of detail about the various roles in the book itself, but for those who haven't read the book, I found a website and a blog post which give a good summary. I've quoted the roles from the website below:
The Surgical Team
The surgeon is the chief programmer and the el-presidente of the whole
team. He produces all the
specifications, codes the entire
system the team is responsible for,
tests it, and drafts its supporting
documentation.
The copilot is the surgeon’s assistant. His main purpose is to
share in the thinking about design
issues – to serve as a sounding board,
as it were. The copilot represents the
team in meetings with other teams. He
knows the code intimately, and serves
as insurance in case of disaster to
the surgeon.
The toolsmith supports the surgeon and builds specialized utilities and
tools as may be required by his
surgeon. Each team has its dedicated
toolsmith in addition to any central
services provided by the rest of the
project infrastructure. The tester is
responsible for maintaining test cases
for testing the surgeon’s work as he
writes it. He is both an adversary who
devises test cases to measure against
the formal specs and devises test data
to be used in debugging.
The language lawyer, which can serve several surgeons, I a widely consulted
specialist who delights in the mastery
of the intricacies of the programming
languages and the operating systems
upon which the software must perform.
The administrator handles money, people, space, and machines. The
surgeon is the ultimate boss, with the
last word on all these issues, but the
day to day management of the issues
and interfacing with the
administrative machinery of the
project is the role of a professional
administrator. One administrator may
serve more than one team.
The editor edits and revises the documentation as drafted or dictated
by the surgeon and oversees the
mechanics of its production.
The program clerk, trained as a secretary, is responsible for
maintaining all the machine-readable
and human-readable technical records
generated by the team. All the filing
and indexing is the responsibility of
the program clerk.
The secretaries handle the project correspondence and non-project files.
We did use the surgical team approach of Brooks' at a startup we set up about 10 years ago. We were five people at the company plus a few others at the uni lab supporting us. The experience was technically great, but it didn't last long for business reasons. :-)
I am starting a game design project with a group of three other students. We would like to use some open source hosting service for version control, a wiki, etc. I have looked at threads like these (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10490/best-open-source-project-hosting-site, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29736/what-open-source-hosting-service-should-i-use, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities) but am still not sure which is best for our situation. Those threads seem to focus more on large scale, long term open source projects, whereas my group will be small and working together for a relatively short time.
Here are my constraints:
group of 4-5 people
10+ hours per week per person spent working on this project until May 2010
Language/framework: C# XNA
IDE: Visual Studio 2008
project will be no bigger than 100 mb
Features that would be nice to have:
Wiki
Milestone tracking
Issue/bug tracking
Code reviews
Document hosting (like the game manual, design spec, etc)
I'm thinking CodePlex would be nice because of its support for Visual Studio. I've had a positive experience with CodePlex in the past for a tiny project. However, Assembla has a nice UI, and its time tracking feature/linking tickets to SVN commits seems like it could be really helpful. (The time tracking in particular appeals to me, because if certain group members are slacking it could show through here.)
Google Code has been praised by many in the aforementioned threads, and everyone in my group has a Google account.
Also, I'm not sure which license we should pick for our project.
Codeplex already has lots of XNA related projects being hosted on it. One of the great things about codeplex is that you can choose from a large number of source control clients. It supports the TFS client, SVN, and mercurial. So from a flexibility perspective, it's very very simple.
From a license perspective ... well, you didn't really give enough information about what your goals are. Do you want a license like GPL, which ensures that your code can't be used in a closed source project dodwnstream? Do you not really care who does what?
Personally, for the open source projects I've hosted on codeplex, I prefer the mozilla public license. It basically says the code is as is, and you can do whatever you want with it, open or closed.
Google Code has been praised by many
in the aforementioned threads, and
everyone in my group has a Google
account.
I think this coupled with easy usage of Docs/Groups/etc. and what not for things you dont nesscearily want public as well as group integration, all with interfaces that the entire team is most likely already used to working with, makes it a logical choice unless there are some features better fulfilled by another service in your opinion. In not nessecarily singing the normal paraises of google here - it just seems like a very pragmatic no fuss solution.
We are currently evolving our development processes in an effort to become CMMI compliant (we will start with level 2, and move up from there). We are trying to locate a tool that is inexpensive (or free) that will allow us to develop requirements in the spirit of CMMI. In other words, we need to be able to enter our requirements, track changes to them, provide alerts to individuals when requirements change, perform traceability, etc. Our projects are typically small (typically 3 - 7 developers and a tester or two).
We have looked at many of the commercial tools, but they cost more than we are able to afford. We looked at a few on SourceForge (OSRM and others) but could not find anything that was sufficiently mature that also had the features that we needed.
We are looking for suggestions for a tool that meets the above requirements.
INCOSE is an excellent resource for this sort of question. They maintain a Tools Database that indexes COTS and GOTS System Engineering tools. Some of the tools that perform requirements management also have high-level System Eng functionality (CORE, for example) whereas others are more narrowly-focused (i.e. RequistePro).
Most of these tools will cost money, but may provide some limited free functionality. Workspace.com, for example, provides some free functionality. I would recommend against rolling your own solution, or adapting a tool that is not specifically intended for requirements management, because the hidden cost of getting it going, as well as inefficiency at the intended task could become burdensome.
If you absolutely can't afford to spend any money on a requirements tool, it would be better to use the free functionality from a commercial tool. But don't do that... pony up the cash for RequisitePro and sleep better knowing that you're getting the right tool for the job.
How about starting of with a Wiki? We use TWiki but there are many others available. The wiki we uses
sends an email when any pages change
stores the history of changes to each page
by using the auto-linking of wikis you can create a hierarchy of requirements
This seems to cover most of your items. Wikis like TWiki have plugins which may also help you.
If you only have 3-7 developers on a project using one of the big commercial tools may be far too complex for what you need.
We're heavily into CMMI at our company, but all of our tools are developed in-house.
All I can recommend is to develop your own tools. You will at least have the advantage that it will reflect your business process.
In general, for a new tool, we start off with a tool developed on a project, which is then shared with the rest of the company, if it has been successful. Don't be afraid to use Excel to trace your requirements along with a statuts, which along with a good change control system, such as subversion, gives you a lot of traceability.
A team in the company I used to work for was working on customizing Visual Studio Team System work item templates to handle requirements tracking. One goal, which you should consider as well, was to enable traceability from requirements through to developer work items and then defects. This enables some powerful analysis of which requirements are tied to the most defects.