Dear Madam/Sir,

According to our records you have downloaded a version of WebLOAD Open Source. We would like to reiterate the following:

-WebLOAD Open Source has been declared End of life (EOL)

If you still have a version of the product we remind you that under the EULA, any distribution of the product or using it to service third parties is strictly forbidden.

What are the options available to you?

For a limited time RadView offers a competitive upgrade to WebLOAD Professional. We encourage you to contact a sales rep in your region quickly as discounts are set to expire.

Yada, yada, yada marketschpiel

Here's my response:

Well I'm glad I ended up staying with jmeter for my load testing needs then.

You may want to take a look at how your community is seeing you. This is not exactly the best way to acquire new clients or even retain your existing ones.
http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/5922

Now I will go out of my way to recommend any competition to you (even commercial, fully closed source) because at least I know what I get when I purchase from them instead of getting what seems like a bait-and-switch. I don't have time to deal with dishonest people, I have software to write.

It's not like there's no alternatives.

Maybe they hired a Music lawyer as their marketing person?

And honestly, did they really think nobody was going to blog about this??

It's too easy for us to say "I'm still working on associating the widgets to the watzits". But with this level of information the customer only hears " - still - ".

Instead, we should provide visibility to the customer of the things inside the feature we're doing. "Working on associating the widgets to the watzits - I just finished the service and controller test and code and today I'm going to work on the JSP. After that I should be able to run the interaction and the tests. My roadblocks are XX". These couple of sentences by themselves provide:

• A list of subtasks
• A current status
• What's left
• What problems you're finding

Note that we didn't go into too much of a level of detail at this point - you can always clarify on subsequent sentences. Even if it doesn't mean a lot to the business people, in their brain now there's at least a "step 2 of 4" connection, making things easier for them when planning ahead. Other developers can know what area you're on and what to avoid (or what touches their stuff), and people with special skills (web devs, db people) can more or less suspect when they will be needed, helping them plan their day or be proactive.

This has another important side benefit: A lot of times us techies complain that "project managers and business types don't get it". Well, without the repetition of giving this level of detail out on a daily basis, there is no way to "teach" project managers what is hard for whom and have them remember.

These same business people who "don't understand code" will most likely eventually "get" whether JSPs are easier or harder than controllers in general, and good managers who are in tune with human factors will also understand which are harder or easier for different people (helping with job assignments) even if they don't even know what a controller is.