Putting Stress on the Books Means Better Service

Compuware QAHiperstation Helps McGraw-Hill Stress Test New Order Processing System

By the time The McGraw Publishing Company merged with The Hill Publishing Company in 1909 to create McGraw-Hill Book Company, both companies had already published science and technology journals for several years. Messrs. McGraw and Hill, who shared a deep interest in science and technology during an age of rapid discovery, oversaw the initial expansion of their publishing concern as the need for effective communication of technical information grew as well.

Today, that growth hasn't abated. Now known as The McGraw-Hill Companies, the corporation is a global publishing, financial, information and media services organization with 16,000 employees located in more than 400 offices in 30 countries. The corporation, with 1997 sales close to US$9 billion, is a leading information services provider, meeting worldwide needs in education, business, finance, the professions and government.

Growth, however, can itself bring about the need for new technologies and new processes. That's readily apparent in Blacklick, Ohio, the suburban Columbus location of the largest McGraw-Hill distribution center for educational materials, book clubs and book stores. During busy periods, when elementary, high school and college text book orders are coming in for the next school year, the distribution center in Blacklick can ship close to US$8 million worth of inventory a day.

The problem of growth was evident at Blacklick--recent publishing acquisitions had meant managing three different order processing systems. The decision was made to merge the three systems into one. And one of the major questions the Information Services group at Blacklick asked themselves was: how can we test this huge new system? That's when Compuware QAHiperstation came into play.

"It took us two and a half years to develop this new order processing system," said Rich Harman, quality control manager for the Information Services group at Blacklick. "The whole idea was to get to one system that we could support more readily, instead of having our resources divided up to support three different ones. With one order processing system, we knew we had to test it very thoroughly before it went into production--we needed a thorough stress test. But we knew that the time to test this system would be short. That's one reason why we used QAHiperstation."

Part of Compuware's QACenter family of application testing products, QAHiperstation is a mainframe testing solution that enables systems and application programmers and quality assurance personnel to streamline the testing process and improve the quality of VTAM applications, including applications running in IMS/DC, IDMS/DC, CICS and TSO.

"QAHiperstation works very well for stress testing," noted Harman. "It wasn't only a software issue--whether our new application would work or not. It was a hardware question as well. Simply put, we took last year's peak use levels for the systems we were merging, and projected what our new peak levels would be. Once we determined the number of terminals and users, we fed this information into QAHiperstation to simulate a certain number of users in the environment for a specific time frame. We found we needed to make significant changes to both our order entry application and the hardware."

QAHiperstation Works in Crunch Mode

One of the most daunting aspects of testing McGraw-Hill's new order processing system was the small window of opportunity Harman and his staff had to stress test the application. Despite the time crunch, QAHiperstation enabled staff to complete the stress tests on time. "We began training on QAHiperstation in late December of 1997. By early January we had our stress test plan together, and we had completed the tests by the first week of February. We went live with the new single system in March. We had roughly six weeks to test on weekends and make a report to management. QAHiperstation works exactly as stated: it automates the testing process. Still, I wish we had this product six months sooner--it would have saved me some weekends!"

To develop the stress test simulation, Harman's staff used QAHiperstation to record the keystrokes of order-taking representatives on the systems. "That created a very large script, a whole day's worth of data," said Harman. "Then we had numerous meetings with the user community. I said to them "OK, we're trying to test this new order processing system; what are you doing on your systems on a regular basis?" We got their IDs and we got a good idea of how often they used it, so we knew what we needed to test, what they did most frequently: inquiries, order entry, returns processing and so on. We took that information and built the data that we needed to run the stress testing. Now, instead of having to run a three-hour restore all the time and then re-test, we had files built with the data we needed to run our script over and over again, without having to reload. That was extremely beneficial. QAHiperstation enabled us to test for 12 hours in a day. We could have run the test six times if we wanted to."

Harman and his staff used the results documented by QAHiperstation to justify the changes to the application and the hardware. "We saw a lot of deadlocks and stalls when we ran the stress tests. Management came back and asked us "Are you sure you're running this right? Are you sure we're going to have 500 users hit the enter key at the same time?" We said yes; the environment we projected and simulated when we ran the stress tests with QAHiperstation was exactly what we saw when we brought the application into production."

Because QAHiperstation builds tests that represent all conditions of a program by capturing and recording actual transactions, IT staffs can build repeatable tests in a simulated production environment--and that was a great help for Harman. "QAHiperstation showed us not only changes that needed to be made to the application, but to the CPU as well. In our case, the CPU just didn't have the capability to run the application; the memory was insufficient to run the application's batch jobs. QAHiperstation helped document the need for a memory upgrade; that's an important aspect. Many times, tech support managers have a hard time justifying an upgrade to hardware. QAHiperstation can well be used to provide that documentation."

More Work Ahead for QAHiperstation

The usefulness of QAHiperstation didn't end with the move of the order processing application into production. "We're going to use this to test other applications before they go into production," said Harman. "We would like to get to the point where QAHiperstation is just used for application testing. Whether 1,000 users are going to hit the system, or wE're putting a new map in CICS, I would like to make sure that the application works before we get it into production: just pull a test script off the shelf and run it.

"QAHiperstation is working as billed. I think it will play a large part in the future for what we need to do at McGraw-Hill. I want to utilize it to the highest degree that I can because I need to make sure applications go into production right the first time--that's my objective. I'm going to use any tool I can to do that. If we have the scripts and we know how to test some application, let's use it. If we can pull something off the shelf that we know is a proven performer to test a component, like QAHiperstation, that's what we're going to do.