Load Testing Gives Clean Bill of Health to Medical Software Provider

For more than 20 years, the AMISYS Operations of Amisys Synertech Inc. relied on external resources for help testing the aptitude of its managed care software products. Today, AMISYS developers are taking matters into their own hands with the help of QACenter Performance Edition.

The AMISYS Operations of Amisys Synertech Inc. provides comprehensive information management software for healthcare payers. The company's current customer base consists of approximately 76 insurers, ranging in coverage size from 50,000 to 800,000 members.

Its premier solution, AMISYS 3000, recently went through a platform migration, and is now known as AMISYS Advance. This highly functional application automates membership enrollment and eligibility, contract management and pricing, and claims processing for managed care organizations, HMOs and PPOs, nationwide. Future enhancements are planned for AMISYS Advance in subsequent releases.

AMISYS 3000 runs on a proprietary environment. "Since our vendor had the tools and expertise, we depended on them to build the scripts to help us benchmark basic transactions," says Kevin Larkin, senior technical development advisor at AMISYS. When the vendor announced to AMISYS that it wouldn't offer support in a couple of years for its environment, AMISYS decided to migrate to one of the hardware provider's more open environments.

At that point, "we knew we'd have to benchmark AMISYS Advance again, to prove to our customers that they would see comparable performance if they moved to the new environment," says Larkin.

To provide benchmark support for the new environment, Larkin and his team opted to bring all benchmark responsibility in-house. "It was time to purchase a product to do the scripting and testing ourselves," says Larkin. After researching load testing products on the Internet and viewing demos from four vendors, the team made the decision to purchase Compuware's QACenter Performance Edition for two key reasons: "This tool was the best fit for us in terms of its flexibility, and the cost-benefit ratio was impressive," says Larkin.

AMISYS developers use QACenter Performance Edition's QALoad product. This tool allows benchmark teams to simulate the load generated by hundreds or thousands of users on an application-without requiring the involvement of the end users or their equipment. Benchmark teams can easily repeat load tests with varied system configurations to achieve optimum performance.

Develop Benchmark Scripts Efficiently

Larkin's team purchased QALoad in fall 2002. "After only two days of training, we were actually beginning to script real transactions for our applications. By week's end, we had about three-quarters of one of our most complex transactions completed, and that set the tone for how things proceeded from there," says Larkin.

QALoad was very instrumental in identifying areas for improvement, maximizing efficiency and proving our product's performance rates, to help us best serve our customers. —Kevin Larkin, Senior Technical Development Advisor, AMISYS Operations

QALoad provides customized modules that facilitate the development of benchmark scripts. Those modules allow analysts to record the traffic an application generates and convert it into a benchmark script. The script measures the time taken to perform transactions and ensures that the system under test performs to specifications under load.

Larkin believes QALoad's strongest feature and benefit is how it builds new transaction scenarios so easily. "Once you have a basic suite of scripts, each duplicating one of the basic transactions, it's very easy to combine them into different, more customized transaction mixes based on a customer's needs," says Larkin. "We can easily shift the load, run a benchmark and tell a customer, 'Here's how you can expect our application to perform.'"

With previous products, AMISYS performed application load testing on a biannual basis-with external support. At that point, benchmark efforts were restricted to "a very specific set of transactions and a load profile. That was all we could test," says Larkin.

Larkin considers AMISYS' primary competitive strength is that the company can offer customers more configurable, flexible systems than those of its competitors. Likewise, he believes generating customized transaction reports is a significant step in the right direction.

Build Customer Confidence

The AMISYS Operations of Amisys Synertech Inc. is currently using QALoad continuously, in what Larkin calls a "benchmark, evaluate, improve, benchmark, evaluate, improve" cycle, ensuring AMISYS Advance is at the level customers demand. "QALoad was very instrumental in identifying areas for improvement, maximizing efficiency and proving our product's performance rates, to help us best serve our customers," says Larkin.

After AMISYS shared summary- and detail-level benchmarking reports with customers at a recent presentation, one customer commented, "Wow, AMISYS has a huge amount of valuable information here about your product's performance." Comments like that have convinced Larkin that QALoad gives customers the hard evidence and confidence needed to move forward with AMISYS Advance.

Larkin and his team are so pleased using QALoad to test the character-based version of AMISYS Advance that they "have all intentions of purchasing QALoad's GUI-based tools in the near future, for testing our GUI-based version," says Larkin. In fact, Larkin foresees using QALoad every time his team performs benchmarking tests, prior to new releases of all products.

"We are very pleased with the many features and flexibility that this tool provides," says Larkin.