Field Stories - Managing Through the Logistics of Change

Here's a new customer story we just completed about working with a leading Europe logistics company on integration and performance testing throughout a comprehensive change process. This large transportation vendor handles both sea and land operations for passengers and freight, and handles a very high volume of traffic through its management and reservation systems.

This situation represents a complete replacement of the custom systems the company cobbled together over the last 20+ years with a completely new solution set, using some of the best-of-breed logistics and TM software packages on the market, along with integration software from Software AG (webMethods) and some Oracle systems of record. In order to get there, this company built a new team to allow a "competency center" around integration, to match the investments it was making in a newer, more scalable platform.

Obviously, with so many critical operations on the line, the integration center immediately identified performance testing as a primary task. They already had individuals attempting to verify response times by testing UI elements such as passenger and ferry reservation websites, with little success, so they turned to the back-end elements, where the harder business process calculations need to be made.

By directly invoking the message broker, integration framework and the system of record behind the browser, they were able to deliver a system that has so far run without critical failures in its first seven months of operations. At the same time by automating the execution of regression and performance test runs, they avoided needing to hire several more testers - estimating a reduction of 33% or more of the testing cost.

You can download the complete story here: http://www.itko.com/resources/europelogics.jsp.

Comments

[Manoj Philip Mathen]

Component level or service level performance testing is of utmost importance than ever. Usually what happens in a typical enterprise is :- Once the entire application is ready, we load/performance test the entire application , bottle necks are found, however its too late to re-engineer or re-design the entire application. So, developers/architects just can optimize the code. The base design/framework remains the same and only some tweeking or patches are possible.

This component level/service level performance testing should be done as and when each component is ready and this helps in solving the real issue!