Apache JMeter

I once had an acquaintance -- a moved-on colleague -- who worked exclusively with JMeter, or so he claimed. His job title was Performance Tester, and I was led to understand that JMeter was all about performance testing, load testing, stress testing.  I remember being somewhat surprised because at that point I had been naively oblivious to the specialist trends in IT. He had mastered one piece of software and was making a good living at it. I asked him if it was hard, and he said, "No, I just push a button, wait for the run to end, produce the report, and repeat with a different number of users. Sometimes I change the environment it's pointing at."

I asked if it was hard to set up, and he replied that he hadn't set it up. The setup had been done before he arrived. That occasionally something went wrong and he had to work out what it was and fix it, which could be fiddly and tiresome. These bumps in the road apart, he liked his job and had it down pat. 

Other than my above former colleague, I've never met anyone who likes JMeter. There are tutorials explaining how straightforward it is, how easy to master it is, how widely used it is, etc, lifting your heart and soul to the sure and certain knowledge that you, too, can become a performance guru. And then you point it at the software that is your bread and butter and it's glitch after glitch, error after error, frustration after frustration. I don't know anyone who thinks it's intuitive, Oh, and I remember the fun we had setting up the Firefox proxy for JMeter, which promised to make everything plain sailing. Except it didn't.

Perhaps you think this is just me. Sour grapes on the part of someone who couldn't get to grips with it. It truly isn't. I'm someone more than ready to blame my lack of understanding ahead of blaming the tool. No, I've discussed JMeter with many testers who have used it for its intended purpose and they've come away frustrated... and relieved when they get a break from it. 

Lest this all seem like protracted gripe, it's actually a prelude to me spending some days doing Raghav Pal's JMeter Masterclass, which can be found here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoW2pBak1_Q

I'm currently enjoying learning Katalon, but it's good to break it up a bit. Who knows? I may chance upon a tool that really suits me.