Case Study: Load Testing a Migrated Desktop Product

The Company. This Client is a leading supplier of discovery, collaboration, and knowledge enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases and consulting services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical industries. The Company provides: Enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases, and professional services for biotechnology, drug discovery and chemical research, including software, databases, and web sites which enable customers to create, analyze and communicate chemical, biological, and scientific information more effectively.

The Products. This Client’s products are used primarily in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical industries, as well as in higher education and in academic and government research. The company's principal software is the de facto standard and primary communication tool on the chemist's desktop. The enterprise version of this solution enables research information organizations to deploy application and information solutions using Internet, intranet, and extranet technologies. These solutions are now in use by companies such as Abbot Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, etc.

The Challenge. Our client was creating a new version of this product in a more modern platform and they wanted to convince old customer to migrate to the new version. Therefore, we had to demonstrate that the new version had a better performance and that it was more reliable. Based on its experience, the Belatrix Quality Assurance team proposed to automate the process to load-test the system.

The Outsourcing Model. The engaged Belatrix in a long-term outsourcing model.

The Solution. Along with the client Belatrix decided that the best option was to create a custom test automation framework that allows us to:

• Load a data base with a large amount of data
• Simulate a WAN in a LAN
  • Network latency
  • Bandwidth
  • Delay
• Simulate Inactive and active users in the system
• Perform tests over the system
• Control every parameter from a controller script
  • Tests
  • WAN parameters (Latency, Bandwidth, etc)
  • Sequence
  • Results
  • Repetitions
  • etc

Some of the testing tools and technologies that were chosen included:

• Python
• .NET
• DummyNet
• XML
• TOAD

The Results. Belatrix helped the Client define and implement the performance test strategy.

Also Belatrix contributed to identify and fix performance problems and demonstrate that the newest version of the product had several advantages over the older version.

You may contact us to enquire about our Quality Assurance Outsourcing Services.