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. This particular Client had an India Testing team whose work ended up being migrated to Belatrix after the proven successes in our testing strategies.

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 Products in Question

We tested an application that transforms the numbers in your database into graphics on your screen to visualize complex organic chemical formulas online on a Web page. Retrieve or search for a set of compounds, choose the data you want to see, whether it is biological test results in Oracle tables, physical property values calculated automatically or prices in a catalog, and also another module that will generate an interactive window showing a scatterplot, histogram, or other useful data graphic.

The Challenge

Ensure the scalability of the migration of an existing website intended to perform chemical searches for the pharmaceutical industry and chemical industry. Determine if the new site could match or even exceed the existing site’s performance while making queries to the Database. By performance we mean:

• Measure the response time for a web chemical search for each individual user.
• Measure the response time for all the queries made to the Oracle Data base.
• Compare the results of the new site and match then with the production site
• Present new alternatives to improve the response time of the application

The Solution

Using OpenSta (an open source application) we recorded several test scripts to simulate the different kind of searches that a normal user would take while using the application. This allowed us to:

• Know exactly how many concurrent users the application would support.
• We were able to simulate from 10,000 to 100,000 queries per hour
• Predict the scalability of the application in terms of hardware

The Results

Our process and software testing strategy allowed us to first determine the existing performance gap between the new site and the production site, the first cases showed that the new application was under the estimated performance, the results were extremely useful for the developers to detect in the code the areas that needed to be polished. After a few testing cycles the new application was able to work in a better way than the production site.

By leveraging Belatrix testing services, The Client was able to obtain:

• A quicker site than the existing one.
• Refine the results of the queries by comparing the results in both sites.
• Realize that the existing hardware wasn’t enough for the new application, thus predicting scalability issues in a live environment.
• Be able to test in an unattended way each build in a defined period of time, this allowed us to apply other kinds of testing to the application like security testing.

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