Open Source has taken a center stage in the development world. It is a community effort which can not stopped. Either you ride it or get run over by it.

One area where open source has not yet made a big dent is in test automation and performance testing.
This area is still dominated by commercial tools. Most of the commercial tools available for automation and performance testing are extremely expensive. The leading tools from HP (QTP, Loadrunner) and Borland ( Silk Performer, Silk Test) come with a huge price tag.

I used to be a developer before I jumped into Performance Testing back in 1998. That time I was still not able to let go of my development skills. For the first Performance Testing assignment I had built a load testing tool using MS VC++ ( are we not talking of open source here?), the GUI for it is shown below. This was perfect for me. It suited all my needs for driving the load on the server. I had other scripts to automate monitoring, logging and analyzing the results ( see the tool image below).  Well right around then the company I used to work for, decided on standardizing the tool set and we settled on Silk Performer ( then a product of Segue). Using the tool was good for my resume value and it did have lots more bells and whistles.
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