A major multi-national IT consultancy encourages its clients to incorporate performance testing to minimise the business risk of the B2C websites failing after going live. Test managers from their own testing services group supervised the testing.

The Testing Project

The requirement was to provide Performance Testing skills to a Travel Operator sponsoring a web-based railway ticket reservation engine. The project was close to the “go-live” date and the developer had assured the concurrency to be more than 750 users. The IT consultancy wanted an independent review and suggested the client re-test the solution for performance.

Testhouse's Contribution

Testhouse assembled a performance testing team comprising of Load Testing Experts, System Administrators and a Test Manager. A suitable test environment was identified and test data was prepared with the help of business users. Initial tests showed misconfiguration of the load balancer and the firewall resulting in the system supporting a maximum of 23 users. After several rounds of testing in a short window of time, severe design flaws were highlighted in the Application Tier to Database Tier connection pool handling. Effective remedies were put in place by the developers and the system throughput was increased to 654 concurrent users on the reservation engine identified as the most resource consuming.

Customer Benefits

• Early identification of a potential business risk
• Opportunity to address design flaws in the application
• Project completion delayed by no more than a week.
• Testhouse helped in putting together an effective testing plan and arranged for the test tool licences

Moral of this Case Study

• Testhouse can put together teams of testing specialists very quickly, to work anywhere in Europe.
• Testhouse’s testing consultants are self-sufficient and need little supervision.
• “Testing is not a bottleneck with Testhouse”.