Chris -
It's great to see you here on these forums. I've had to recently make the transition from LR to LC in the last six months.
My key observations are as follows:
The key thing to realize is that this tool is not LoadRunner. That's why it's an order of magnitude (almost 20x) cheaper than HP LR.
Having worked with LoadComplete in 2 different firms, I find their USP is product support. They are quick to provide fixes, most of them inside of 2 days. The support staff also works collaboratively to devise solutions to the specific issues you have. Above all, their product development team and Director are reachable in case of issues. When I compare this to my experiences with HP, it is night and day.
Once you understand that this is a maturing platform, you will be able to build scripts rapidly.
Some other notes:
1. The tool is more black box than white box. In the sense, their scripts are stored in a proprietary format as are the result files. This has caused me some irritation in being able to edit them outside of their editor interface. Hopefully, this will change. I've had conversations about putting their scripts in an open format and logging results to databases instead of JSON objects in flat files.
2. Their regular expression support is robust. However, they can only catch one expression in a variable. I've asked for the ability to capture an array of matches as opposed to just the one. Again, it's not clear in what release this feature will show up.
3. Scripting support is not there at the moment. This means any custom modification of variables, string manipulation has to happen outside the tool. We have devised a mechanism to get around this limitation and so far it has worked fine. However, I have had a lengthy discussion with the Product Director on this and have been promised full scripting in the coming quarters.
Sergei - are we still good for Q2 2013 for scripting?
4. The relative ease with which scripts can be recorded/replayed is good. It compares well to other tools on the market on this score.
5. Parameterization is supported in a variety of input formats including databases.
6. Correlation is managed by regular expressions that you specify in the editor. It takes a few tries to get this right, especially if it's been a while since you last wrote POSIX-compliant regexps.
7. There is support to monitor server machines of most types.
8. Currently only HTTP/S is supported ( with parameterizable NTLM authentication credentials). So Citrix, Client/Server is out of scope for now.
If the tool moves from a black-box design to a more open extensible design, people like us could extend this tool to do work across more protocols. The last conversation I had with the product folks, I said exactly the same thing - that is, you can't fully anticipate what features the users will want and respond at that speed. Instead make the tool extensible and let the users "roll their own" on the platform.
9. The Controller/Generator setup is similar to that of Loadrunner. Same ports etc.
