PERFORMANCE TESTING

We’ve all read the headlines, heard the news; “such-and-such website crashed today when it received thousands of visits…”. We’re happy to help in these situations and our team have basked in the glory of enough heroic calls-to-action, but whether it’s a new web site, innovative application or a group-wide enterprise system that you’re looking to roll-out, it’s best to verify how these things are going to perform under load and stress before it’s too late.

Our team of performance experts know a thing or two about consulting and appreciate the difference between theory and practice, the four most senior consultants in the practice are all ex-Accenture consultants after all. The difference is, they describe their work as Performance Engineering. They’re not pedantic, just pointing out how our clients prefer pragmatic people who can help them tune and continually optimise their systems, to reports and graphs alone.
 
What do we offer?

We offer the 4 key components of Performance Engineering, either as an end-to-end engagement or individually tailored to suit your requirements. As you may know from our other test practices and solutions, we’re highly flexible.

Scoping & Estimation

Our informative workshops are hugely popular with clients who often use the sessions to join all of the project stakeholders together, including developers, infrastructure guys, third party suppliers and marketing. Half the challenge of Performance Engineering is interpreting the business plan, building the user cases and journeys and reaching sensible risk-based decisions on load. We’ll help you set the scene for the whole project and dispel any smoke and mirrors wizardry.    

Test Initiation, Definition & Preparation

Getting into the nitty gritty, we’ll cover the environment and data requirements, business processes and volumetrics, server side monitoring strategy, tools and methodologies. We’ll get a consensus on KPI’s and agree how best to report. From the high level test plan we’ll drive out the detail and get to the guts of the technologies including those complex Push architectures whilst leveraging our expertise of using the Cloud to build the scenarios, client diversity and volumes that you may need to prove in order to give you confidence.
 
Performance Specification 

With either our own high level test plan in place or working off your plan, which we’ll be happy to validate, we’ll get to work on the performance test scripting, set-up the monitoring tools and configure the preferred test tool and environment. We’ll pull all the third parties and their technologies together, after all the bottlenecks are frequently in the ‘glue’ that sits between them.
 
Test Execution & Results Delivery

The fun bit! But often the most challenging and stressful for inexperienced teams. Thankfully our team of 40 or so performance specialists already have the scars and war stories so when we’re faced with something unexpected (which still happens from time to time), the chances are we’ll have seen your situation before. All said and done, it’s the interpretation of the results and the implementation of our recommendations that stands us apart. We won’t produce the test closure report until you’re happy and we’ll work closely with all the tech teams to get your system - the front end, back end, middleware and platform - to reach it’s optimum performance.
 
Performance Test Tool Support

As with our functional automation practice, our performance team will give you or your colleagues the confidence and skills to get the most out of your commercial or open source tools, or if you’re not yet decided we can help you with the selection process or proof of concept. The commercial tools are expensive and we know you need to show a real ROI. Increasingly, our clients ask us to simply provide the tools as a service, on-demand and through our partnerships with the biggest players, including HP and MicroFocus, we’re delighted to do just that (we also partner with smaller specialists who offer terrific tools and value for money…). Our expertise will withstand the deepest dive in:

• HP LoadRunner (including Performance Centre)
• IBM Rational Performance Tester
• Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications
• MicroFocus Silk Performer
• Facilita Forecast
• Neotys Neoload
• Soasta
• JMeter
• The Grinder

What's next?

Contact us for a no-obligation discussion about how our Performance Testing, or should we say ‘Engineering’, services can give you the confidence to deploy your system in the real-world; giving your team the knowledge and skills to keep your systems optimized, your customers a great user experience and keeping you well away from any negative press!