Load Testing has become easier and more affordable. But still - too much time is wasted in getting to the root cause of the discovered problems. I worked with clients like Novell to speed up their testing throughput by 2-3x by eliminitating unnecessary test iterations, getting in-depth root cause analysis information and overall freeing up test and development resources that were involved in the process Read the full story at blog.dynatrace.com

Hmmn. Is this just a barely hidden plug for a tracing product by any chance?

Hi Chris The message is that load-testing tools as they are don't provide the information you need to analyse your problems identified under load. I wanted to raise awareness of the fact that - even though you can drive load easy and cheap now doesnt mean you fix your problems faster. There are different approaches to solve this data capturing problem. The White Paper that is linked in that blog talks about approaches like Profilers, Debuggers, application specific performance counters or custom logging. There are pros and cons to all of these approaches. Key of all this obviously is that you capture enough information that you need but a) it should not results in lots of manual effort and wasted time and b) should not change the way your application executed by impacting your performance

Hmmn. Is this just a barely hidden plug for a tracing product by any chance?

I had the impression that dynaTrace had been posting a lot on TSS, but I wanted to confirm my suspicions. I did a Google search over TSS for "dynatrace.com" and got 20 hits for 2009, with 16 of those appearing in the "News" section. That seems like a fairly high number of news items. Maybe it would be more appropriate to classify them as blog posts. --Matt The Software Grove

Point taken, Matt. Right now, we don't have a good way of setting up a new blog, and I've taken to placing an occasional external blog post as a news item, more as a way to help generate discussion and debate rather than intending to call it news. The front "news" page has always been used for articles, blog posts, editorials, and other topics that are beyond the news category. I read everything that comes under the category of blog, and I try hard not to let commercial vendors use this as a way of promoting their own products or services. It's a fine line, and one that changes over time. If you think anything I post is erring in the wrong direction, feel free to call me out. Regarding posting to the news page, I think in the next couple of months we'll have a new look and more options for posting different types of news and articles. Stay tuned.