QTP and Load Runner Scripts – Part 1

This article has been submitted by Prarthana Agwania. This is an Article dealing with advance concepts of Load Runner and QTP. This Article assumes that you have working knowledge of both QTP and Load Runner.

Many of you might be aware of the automation testing which requires some automation tool. For Siebel applications, we mostly use HP (formerly Mercury) Quick Test Professional (QTP) for Functional Testing and HP LoadRunner(LR) for Performance Testing.

Though for Performance Testing, LR scripts are prepared from scratch. In our project we provide Click stream documents or Webex recording in order to provide the flow for the functionality.
But the efforts can be saved by converting QTP scripts to LR scripts or rather to be very precise invoking QTP scripts from LR and then capturing the replay of QTP scripts through LR thus resulting in LR scripts.

There can be two approaches to make this possible:

• Using QTP Script directly to run the Load Test using LoadRunner
• Using QTP Script to generate LR Script and then using the same to run a Load Test.

Follow the steps given below to Run QTP Scripts directly using Load Runner

1. Prepare a QTP script.
2. Install QTP on a Load Generator machine.
3. Setup the Load Generator machine for Terminal sessions.
4. Create a controller scenario using QTP script.
5. In the Load Generator details, choose the Virtual User ( vuser) limits tab and increase the GUI limit.

Now you are all set to start the test. But the method has its own constraints.

Since Load Test requires to have a large amount of load in the form of no. of virtual users performing a certain task, QTP has its limitation of taking the full control on GUI desktop of a computer. So that means only one QTP script can be run per computer which implies that we will require that many physical computers in order to run multiple QTP scripts.

The problem can be overcome by using Terminal Server or Citrix Server or VMWare which will generate number of virtual desktops on a single machine. But here comes another issue of licenses. LoadRunner requires a GUI vuser license to run QTP scripts in the controller. Running each vuser requires a separate GUI vuser license.

Readers please note: Some of you might be thinking that we need to have QTP licenses as well in order to open that many instances of QTP. This is not the case. You only have to have GUI vuser licenses.