The Client
The client is an international company based in Vienna, Austria, specializing in software and organizational solutions for both businesses and organizations around the globe. In 1995, the client develops an EDMS – an electronic document management system – and has received commissions from CERN, the European Commission, Thales and Worley Parsons among others. This provides the client with a solid representation and market positions in countries such as Austria, Armenia, Germany and Switzerland.
The Situation
The electronic document management system allows an employee to create a document with a strictly defined purpose, after which the document is sent to another user, who’s authorized to implement specific changes and corrections, approve and forward the document to others. The system grants users with different levels of access and authorization, where certain employees can appoint others to complete specific tasks on documents. These are just a few of the main functionalities integrated in the EDMS.
Quality House comes in on the project to develop a comprehensive performance test including front-end and back-end performance in order to establish firm performance limits. This is a considerate undertaking as Quality House invests long hours into researching the project’s specifics and tools best suited to meet the client’s requirements. The client seeks to know their product’s maximum user capacity before the system lags in its response to commands. The initial estimated deadline stood at 3 months and the assigned team worked on site for the client, successfully meeting the deadline.
Quality House comes in on the project to develop a comprehensive performance test including front-end and back-end performance in order to establish firm performance limits. This is a considerate undertaking as Quality House invests long hours into researching the project’s specifics and tools best suited to meet the client’s requirements. The client seeks to know their product’s maximum user capacity before the system lags in its response to commands. The initial estimated deadline stood at 3 months and the assigned team worked on site for the client, successfully meeting the deadline.
The Challenge
Complications arose from the system architecture, which incorporates a score of functions and authorizations made available to system users. Quality House had to study every functionality in great detail and the team had to perform testing in an environment that didn’t match the one of end users. The system was created in .NET – another obstacle in the correct measurement of performance. Furthermore, certain system modules were third-party and our team could not adjust configurations to meet our needs.
Quality House had to run front-end and back-end testing simultaneously and timing proved to be difficult as one program had to generate users and the other had to activate at just the right moment to measure the rendering time for certain pages.
Quality House had to run front-end and back-end testing simultaneously and timing proved to be difficult as one program had to generate users and the other had to activate at just the right moment to measure the rendering time for certain pages.
The Objective
Quality House was tasked with the design of an adequate and easy-maintenance performance testing solution, which the client could reuse time and time again to test their product for new configurations, version and clients. The project called for 7 test cases simulated users would run to load the back-end, enabling the tool at the front-end to make complex measurements. A further requirement stipulated these scripts had to be easy to use even by individuals who had no technical knowledge of performance testing and the specifics of programs used to complete it.
The team selected JMeter to test back-end performance and WebPageTest for the front-end performance. To better understand the scale of the undertaking, Quality House operatives had to collect and verify acceptance criteria, analyze testing results, create weekly reports, find performance bugs, retest, ensure performance issues are fixed, monitor server resources, examine potential bottlenecks in the system and perform weekly client meetings to report the progress.
The team selected JMeter to test back-end performance and WebPageTest for the front-end performance. To better understand the scale of the undertaking, Quality House operatives had to collect and verify acceptance criteria, analyze testing results, create weekly reports, find performance bugs, retest, ensure performance issues are fixed, monitor server resources, examine potential bottlenecks in the system and perform weekly client meetings to report the progress.
The Solution
The first project stages focused on creating test cases complete with detailed documentation on how the client can alter different settings to achieve further test variations based on their specific needs. Quality House further worked to fully integrate the back-end and front-end testing systems and automated all test cases to meet the client’s objectives.
For the front end, Quality House developed a minification in CSS together with JavaScript to lighten the code and combined scripts. The assigned removed the inline stylization, decreased the HTTP server requests and also created image sprites again to restrict the number of server requests and accelerate page rendition.
For the back end, Quality House gave detailed optimization suggestions to increase response times for certain functionalities. This increased overall performance and provided the client with a framework that’s easy to build upon and understand in greater detail.
For the front end, Quality House developed a minification in CSS together with JavaScript to lighten the code and combined scripts. The assigned removed the inline stylization, decreased the HTTP server requests and also created image sprites again to restrict the number of server requests and accelerate page rendition.
For the back end, Quality House gave detailed optimization suggestions to increase response times for certain functionalities. This increased overall performance and provided the client with a framework that’s easy to build upon and understand in greater detail.
The Conclusion
Despite the intricacies inherent in this project, the Quality House team concluded work on the testing solution in time and provided an efficient, user-friendly testing solution to the client’s great satisfaction. We received positive feedback and praise for the outcome and work pace and has been using our performance test solution ever since.