Service Without Fail

When you're an IT services provider presented with a multi-million-dollar contract, there's a lot riding on the integrity and scalability of the site you develop for the customer. Such was the case at Corporate Services, Inc., who had the responsibility to create and maintain a web site with an eventual 5,000 internal users placing and tracking orders for marketing materials.

When Corporate Services first obtained the contract from its multi-billion-dollar customer, it was given the task to develop a web site from which the customer's sales representatives would order promotional items and sales collateral. Initially, the pilot group would include 350 employees, but the site had to be able to handle up to 5,000 concurrent users.

Robert Boenne, senior network engineer, describes the project: "For this particular customer, we warehouse information sheets and promotional items such as pens with the product logo on them that sales representatives would leave with their customers. We are responsible for taking orders from the sales people within the very specific limits our customer has set. For example, they may have a 30-day window of products they're able to order. Some are not able to order until they've been trained on specific products. Then there are regional limits. So all kinds of limits had to be taken into account when designing this web site.

"Primarily the site is used for ordering, not browsing. The sales people know what they want, they know what they're checking and it's all very heavy data access without static data being involved." Once an order is placed, sales people receive an order confirmation number for tracking purposes. They can also access the site to see the quantity of product still available to them, based on limits and allocations. Managers can use the site to see what employees in their groups are ordering, what particular items other managers are pushing, how often they're accessing the system and how much inventory is still left.

"Our challenge," Boenne continues, "was we had good programmers who knew how to develop the applications, but did not necessarily have the wealth of experience to determine the best way to tune them to run within the constraints of the pilot environment—let alone have them scale to 5,000 users." That's when Boenne and his group discovered QACenter Performance Edition from Compuware.

QACenter Meets the Challenge

An automated load testing and server monitoring solution designed for e-business, client/server and ERP applications, QACenter Performance Edition helps pinpoint problems, optimize system performance and promote successful application deployment by combining functionality for load testing, data management, resource utilization and performance monitoring. It not only tells users when there's a problem with their applications, it tells them where the problem is, so they can get a jumpstart on finding the solution.

QACenter Performance Edition accelerates productivity and efficiency. With its faster scripting and improved frames support, QACenter Performance Edition enables organizations to more easily achieve service level agreements. The product also helps businesses accurately record and play back thousands of virtual user transactions, thereby creating accurate simulations to measure the performance and scalability of entire applications. In addition, QACenter Performance Edition produces server metrics reports that are useful to developers, testers, managers and others.

Discovered Inefficiencies Are Easily Corrected

After having investigated several other tools and finding them lacking in functionality, Boenne and his team decided to use QACenter Performance Edition to test the scalability of their programs. "The product fulfilled all the items we had set out to be the deciding factors for our testing purposes, including server monitoring, easy script development, ability to handle multiple domains and specialized session handling," he states. Corporate Services started using QACenter after the web site was developed. Initial testing revealed the site was not going to reach the required levels.

Most of Corporate Services' testing was completed in a test environment set up specifically for the application, "because we knew the majority of our problems were with the efficiency of different parts of the code, as opposed to the hardware," Boenne says. "That's where we needed to place our focus," he continues. "Even though conventional wisdom is to test a live environment, it was appropriate for us to run QACenter against the test environment because it was a subset of our production environment and still representative of the machines." Once this task was completed, Boenne and his team ran tests against the production environment to verify the results.

QACenter Performance Edition proved essential in identifying the web site's break points. "Specifically, it has the monitoring tools that allow us to monitor different server counters such as on the database server and web servers," Boenne states. "By monitoring those as we would run the test, we were able to draw correlation between the load we were placing on the front-end and the load the systems were getting on the back-end to see what exactly is causing our issues. A particular challenge was the database locking and by simply redesigning small parts of the code, we were able to achieve great leaps in performance that would not be apparent unless the application was under a constant heavy load."

QACenter Performance Edition helped identify the problems Corporate Services was experiencing with its site primarily by its ability to simulate user loads. Boenne is confident that the application is capable of standing up to the expected user demand. "QACenter Performance Edition has totally removed the guessing game of application performance by helping us to quickly zero in and isolate application problem areas. Before using QACenter, our application crashed at 15 users and now it is able to handle more than 5,000."

Building Testing into Future Products

For this project, Corporate Services chose to lease a copy of QACenter Performance Edition. Boenne says he and his group were so impressed by the product that future plans will involve either including the lease price in contracts for web site development or possibly making the decision to purchase the product. "Either way, we're going to make sure that QACenter Performance Edition is part of our development process from now on," he says.