Web traffic spikes: How Assurity Cloud enables a client to pass the test.
SECTOR / INDUSTRY
CAPABILITIES FEATURED
CASE STUDY PDF
OVERVIEW
As it moves from ambitious startup to established business, a leader in talent management services has engaged Assurity Consulting for the delivery of on-demand performance testing services from its Assurity Cloud. Thanks to the service, the organisation can offer existing and potential clients the assurance of reliable performance from a talent management platform which scales to meet the needs of thousands of concurrent users and a total user base of many thousands of people.
KEY OUTCOMES
ABOUT THE CLIENT
The client is at the forefront of talent management and provides an intelligent marketplace which matches people to new opportunities, job placements, short-term assignments, and education courses based on their talents and interests. Conversely, the platform provides recruiters with invaluable insights into the talent pool. The result is a highly mobilised talent experience contributing to agility in human resources management.
THE CHALLENGE
As is the case for most startup organisations, performance testing wasn’t a priority in the early days for this client, with software developers instead focusing on delivering new features or fixing bugs. Furthermore, performance testing is a specialised field, and like most startups, these specialists aren’t generally available to the software development team.
A spokesperson confirms: “We’d run the platform for around seven years with organic growth being handled without any issues, so we hadn’t had to kick the tyres too hard. However, with the company value proposition increasingly proven and growing in popularity, the necessity for assurance in terms of our capability to onboard and deliver for larger organisations became clear.”
The company’s clients are generally large organisations’ chief human resources officers. The spokesperson says stress testing of the platform would confirm its ability to ingest sometimes tens of thousands of new users as a single transaction. That’s because when a new client comes on board – although a Chief Human Resources Officer – they bring with them every employee in that organisation.
“In addition to the chief HR officer, we’d need to satisfy the CIO and security compliance teams that our application won’t interfere with the HR and other systems we integrate with,” the spokesperson adds. “The process includes performance assessment, so we needed something to show that we can handle onboarding 12000 new users, and that end-of-year period when all those people and the employees of every other company using our system log in to check their performance parameters, everything keeps working as it should.”
OUR SOLUTION
Performance testing is usually executed by setting up test exhibitions and accessing public cloud offerings. The limitations of this approach include high costs, transient testing – because it is only conducted ‘at the minute’ – and the usual challenges faced by businesses everywhere, which has the focus of the software development team elsewhere. “The reality of software testing, in general, is that it is a bit like going to the dentist,” comments the spokesperson. “Sure, it is necessary, but it isn’t pleasant.”
With the Assurity Cloud, durable test assets are created and accessed by the client as and when needed; modern software systems, like the client company’s talent management platform, tend to be under continuous development, necessitating a continuous approach to testing.
More than that, though, Assurity brings extensive expertise to bear in the design and execution of the tests. “A lot of the work involved discovery and getting our infrastructure people to patch and repair issues in preparation for the test to work,” the spokesperson explains. “From there, Assurity created and continually amended suitable scripts to run the tests; it is an iterative and collaborative approach – and an exhaustive one,” the spokesperson adds.
This included a detailed formal exercise where Assurity consultants explored every aspect of the system and the measures used for monitoring.
RESULTS
While the headline benefit of performance testing is that Assurity helped equip the client to demonstrate its ability to handle 900 concurrent logins, there is more to it.
The creation of enduring test assets in the Assurity Cloud eliminates the necessity for the client to maintain an expensive internal performance management environment with the associated licensing and operational overhead. At the same time, it puts performance testing within reach of the company whenever required, alleviating the development teams of the burden.
“We now have durable and repeatable assets, which Assurity has provided, that will be added to our main code base,” confirms the spokesperson. “We’ve seen the performance testing in action and how it has identified and helped resolve bottlenecks, so we are confident that future test runs will similarly find issues or provide the assurance sought.”
He says the entire process and engagement with Assurity has proven invaluable and has delivered performance assurance in a fraction of the time it would have taken the internal team.
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