Mercury Interactive Corp will launch next week a budget suite of web site testing tools aimed at small and medium sized enterprises and e-commerce start-ups. The firm will bundle its ‘Astra’ brand tools under a try-before-you-buy proposal, with starting prices less than $10,000. The suite consists of QuickTest, an icon-based user experience simulation scripting tool, LoadTest, software to allow the simulation of many simultaneous users hitting a web site at once, and SiteManager, which scours sites for dead links and missing content. QuickTest will be sold for $2,995, LoadTest is $9,995 for a 50 virtual-user license, and SiteManager is free for download from Mercury’s web site. The company will offer an upgrade path to its enterprise class equivalents.
