Simplify Enterprise Testing With the Right Tools: Two Case Studies (Continued)

LoadRunner for Load Testing
LoadRunner is Mercury Interactive's tool for load testing. It is interactive, allowing testers to modify conditions during testing. A typical situation involves Burlington's human resources application, which any of more than 23,000 employees can access through in-store kiosks. The tool constantly monitors the system, providing essential data for later interpretation.

"You can't remove the human from the process," declares Woods. It is up to the testers to interpret test information, identify any problems, and ultimately suggest improvements to the system.

Burlington uses a testing lab, so that testing activities will not affect the production environment. The lab uses the same architecture as the real system and approximates the real system very accurately. In addition to identifying architecture and hardware issues, tests can reveal software errors. For example, one set of tests showed that one method of ending an operation was safer for the data involved, but another method was faster. Developers could then take that information and resolve the trade-off prudently.

The benefits can be substantial. Burlington is currently migrating from Oracle8i to Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. The tools allow the testers to run sophisticated tests against the middle tier—in their experience, the source of many bottlenecks—and the back-end systems. This would have been impossible with manual testing.

Woods also values the company relationship with Mercury Interactive. He finds its representatives easy to work with and customer-oriented. In the future, Burlington hopes to add performance-monitoring tools, especially for J2EE components on the middle tier.

What would make for a perfect test tool? One with no resource footprint on the system, that could be distributed widely throughout the system with no impact, and that allowed infinite drill-down into detailed layers of code. Until such a tool is created, though,, testers are glad to use these tools to investigate processes that no human could ever hope to solve easily.

About the Author
Edmund X. DeJesus is a freelance technical writer in Norwood, Mass. You can reach him by e-mail at dejesus@compuserve.com.