How the Largest Bank in Australia Made the Switch From LoadRunner to BlazeMeter By Embracing Agile

The bank was languishing under the weight of more than 1,200 legacy scripts within a testing environment that was slow to respond to the agile requirements of the business units (BUs). Moreover, each time LoadRunner needed to be updated or upgraded, unexpected delays would occur and negatively impact project delivery timelines.

Additionally, the bank’s QA team experienced confusion with vulnerability patches — a vitally important feature for financial organizations. Restricted scaling, combined with unreliable after-hours support led to a negative impact on the company’s bottom line.

By moving from LoadRunner to BlazeMeter, the bank found new freedom with open-source technology. Where the team had once relied upon a singular, monolithic scripting system, they could now enjoy the flexibility BlazeMeter offered them. Its sophisticated open-source features allowed QA members to adopt the solution quickly and provided a smooth transition.  

With more than 1,200 proprietary scripts written over the course of many years that were designed to work on LoadRunner and nothing else, the testing team faced a daunting challenge; with the introduction of a new testing tool, who is going to rewrite all 1,200 scripts? The answer to that question was BlazeMeter’s script conversion tool. In collaboration with the BlazeMeter team, the team input the LoadRunner scripts into the tool and it converted the scripts to JMeter, Selenium or other open-source other open-source scripts — saving them hundreds of hours of work.

Additionally, BlazeMeter University provided dozens of online classes to help test engineers succeed. And by utilizing the BlazeMeter cloud for testing along with the internal OPL infrastructure, it opened up testing options they had not had prior, created a more cost-effective approach to testing, and provided a greater sense of security with dedicated IPs. BlazeMeter is engineered with an API-first approach, so integration to AppDynamics for additional reporting was simple.

By migrating from LoadRunner to BlazeMeter, the bank drastically improved their efficiency and productivity. The BlazeMeter team worked very closely and collaboratively with the bank’s QA team to create script conversion tools tailored to their specific needs.  

These improvements resulted in:

• Overall 8 hours saved per release; roughly 120 days (about 4 months) of productivity saved annually.
• An established baseline set of metrics to more effectively determine test success and failures.
• Enabling engineering-led approach by breaking the performance testing silo.
• Truly shifting left by making it easy and empowering engineers and software developers to write scripts, instead of just a specialized NFT team.
• Allowed for testing applications hosted across private data center, public cloud, and SaaS. 

With the transition complete, the bank is now using BlazeMeter across all teams and BUs. It has meant clearer communication, streamlined testing, and a supported, reliable platform.

By migrating from LoadRunner to BlazeMeter, the bank greatly improved their testing practice.  They moved from a centralized, inflexible testing methodology to a distributed, dynamic testing model where each team is responsible for performance testing.  This encourages accountability among team members, improving software quality and speed of delivery.  Moving to BlazeMeter allowed the bank to expand its testing practice beyond performance testing by utilizing other aspects of the platform including functional testing, mock services (service virtualization) and synthetic test data generation.