by Pat Neary
At present, we are making a concerted effort to raise the profile of our load testing product, Dimension LoadTest. This product has been available for over a year now and has been pretty well received by the market. People running JDE E1 projects and preparing to go live see the value in simulating load to performance test their systems. Why wouldn’t they? Especially when it can be done so easily and cost effectively!
Almost all of the LoadTest enquiries we get are from entities that are running big projects where they are somehow changing the infrastructure on which JDE E1 is running. Exactly what they want to test can vary – it might be a change to their network(s), their database(s), their web server(s) etc. Similarly, what they are trying to prove or determine as a result of their testing varies – such as response time(s), break-point(s) etc. Regardless, they somehow want to prove that their new infrastructure is robust and resilient enough to do the job. They want to create load, simulate realistic demand, mitigate risk – They want to test!
Very occasionally, the driver for this kind of testing is simply wanting to know that Oracle as the authors of the software, or their own developers, have not made changes to the software that somehow fundamentally degrades the performance of the applications as they have been implemented and are being used by the customer. After all, how many of us over the years have been caught out by code changes that should never have resulted in a degradation of performance and yet somehow, they did? Is the answer to this question, all of us? I suspect it may be if you have been around for a while.
The surprise to me is that most companies are yet to invest in solutions that allow them to create different kinds of load and to understand the impact of every change event project. Especially when doing so can prove invaluable in finding and fixing issues rapidly.
I certainly believe that to keep your system performing at its peak, creating and testing with significant, realistic loads should be closer to the top of everyone’s to-do lists!
If any of this resonates with you and you would like to find out how you can simply, easily, and affordably make load and performance testing an essential ingredient in every one of your projects reach out to us
