Re-Create vs. Re-Play

March 14, 2011 by Thomas Maufer

I have been struggling how best to convey the idea of how Mu Studio’s approach of dynamically re-creating new, real sessions is different than re-playing old sessions. It’s a tricky concept, but I think that René Magritte said it best when commenting on his painting of a pipe that is labeled “this is not a pipe”:

magrittepipe.jpg

“The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!”

The traffic that Mu Studio generates is a live session, matching the sequence of steps that was captured among real clients and servers, but dynamically generating correct session state variables, correct IP addresses, checksums, lengths, etc. The Mu Test Suite becomes some (or all) of the clients and servers in the original interaction, and creates new sessions that are virtually indistinguishable from the original, so much so that they can fool a real server…millions of times!

So…the traffic from Mu Studio *is* a pipe, not a picture of a pipe. The traffic is real.

Categories: Rants, Studio
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