As intuitive as a product can be, its use could still benefit from a decent set of manuals or guides. It would certainly take much of the guess work out of using and interpreting the product output. If the Rational Software division has produced them, then I can only speculate that maybe they are buried somewhere in the IBM support site.

• Make expression editing more automated
• A better way of the system detecting why certain scripts are not playing back as recorded
• Need the app to tell us at a higher level what went wrong

I’d like to see a tighter integration with Rational Quality Manager and the Jazz platform. Additionally, making the results/reports more customizable would be useful.

The way the solution was developed to build the components is very poor. 

They need to be able to integrate better overall. 

They don't have to change the architecture of the solution, but they need to adjust the development aspects to make it easier and more user-friendly for customers.

Since it is built on Eclipse, it is expected to face corrupted projects that would impact time and efforts.

A better stable platform would be great, they might need to get away from the Eclipse platform and integrate on top of IntelliJ IDEA for a Linux version.

Support for more protocols is required. In one of my projects, we had an application using Oracle NCA protocol. To record this application, third party BSD plugin provided by IBM was used which was not very helpful. The support for this plugin was also not good as IBM support team didn’t know the exact solution.

I would expect tool should support all application types, such as mobile, web applications, XML requests, PDF support etc.

I can't suggest anything as I haven't used the latest version.

User friendliness can be better, as this is one area where it lacks. More over the connectivity options with other IBM in-house products like Rational Clear Quest, IBM Tivoli and Rational Team Concert can be improved.

Overall, all the features have been improved, especially if you need powerful performance testing tools. But, it would be better if this tool supported database connections directly, instead of importing from .csv file

They need to have support for more protocols & frameworks, as well as making it more user friendly.

There are some features that Micro Focus LoadRunner provides, but they are not available in IBM Rational Performance Tester. They should include such features.

It can also have more reports similar to what HP provides. It might also need some improvement in terms of the tools and support for other technology areas. Certain technologies are not supported by every tool. They need to support all sorts of technologies and platforms on which web applications and mobile applications are built. They need complete support for all sorts of technologies.

Reporting needs improvement to provide more customization options in the performance test analyst to build custom reports. Recent versions like 8.6, and 8.7 has better scalability on user load testing.

When compared to competitors, the reporting module in this version was missing user friendly customization on building report variants such asTransaction Percentile Summary etc. Also, I think time cannot be excluded in the report, and no options to create customized report templates exist for reusability. These are two improvement areas which I can think of and I am not sure if they are rectified in the recent release, since I haven’t got much opportunity to use the latest version recently.

Installation and configuration processes, and support from IBM all need to be improved.

The installation and tool setup can take some time, since this involves several components. A review of the licensing implementation would help here.

There could be better process guidance to help inexperienced testers to follow procedures and navigate the tool.