When should we performance test?
It’s never too early (or too late) to performance test. If you’re already in firefighting mode, Altentee will help get you back within expected levels of performance. If you’re about to complete a major development activity, Altentee can verify application performance is where it was intended to be. If you’re thinking about making a change, Altentee will help ensure your design considers performance.
We already have poor performance, what can you do?
Unfortunately performance is often considered last in the development lifecycle, or worse, discovered by your users in production! Altentee will help untangle any performance problems you are in and recommend tuning candidates. We will assist in the identification and resolution of production performance issues.
How do we measure performance?
Altentee will measure performance according to:
1. Availability – how long your application is available to your users. We will test your application for stability and ability to operate under varying load. We look for conditions which might threaten your application’s availability to users.
2. Response Time – how long it takes your application to respond to user requests. We look at the end to end picture and will isolate any components which contribute to slow response times.
3. Throughput – rate at which your application sustains load. We look at varying throughputs and help determine your systems overall capacity.
4. Utilization – the percentage of capacity that your resources are being used. We look at multiple components in your system to determine utilization and efficiency.
How many users will our application support?
Altentee will put rigour into your design and help you determine how many users will actually use the application, how many can use it concurrently and how many it will continue to support in a changing landscape. We look at the world outside the ivory tower. We will test your site with real browsers from real locations around the world to help determine how many users your application will support!
What about best practice? What about commercial tools?
Regardless of context, there really is no best practice. Altentee is about alternatives. We provide practical, affordable alternatives for your performance and test automation requirements. Not being tied to a particular commercial vendor affords us massive flexibility. Altentee can explore a range of solutions to ensure best fit. Look beyond the glossy brochure and focus on your outcomes; a well performing application. Did you know that many of the commercial tools are built on the same technology protocols available to open source tools?
Are you paying too much for licenses?
Consider the cost of an arbitrary commercial user license for load testing software. To simulate 100 virtual users may cost your thousands in licensing. Add to that a yearly maintenance fee and then ask yourself what have you paid for so far? Chances are you’ve just paid for a bundle of associated web and database protocols for which perfectly viable open source alternatives exits. In fact we’re so confident we will demonstrate our capability with an obligation free proof of concept.
Record playback?
Another value proposition from closed source vendors is the ability of their software to simply record your user transactions with a red button, and playback those same transactions with a green button. Speak to any load test practitioner and you will find this is a total fallacy. Unless of course you run the “Hello World” website. In most cases our test cases describe behaviour in plain language and use commonly available scripting languages.
So how do we reduce technical complexity?
Altentee will reduce overall complexity by making best use of technology available today. We’ve evolved from the ‘dialect-cesspool’ of languages and vendor scripts our closed source vendors impart, and favour use of well known scripting languages such as Ruby, Python, Perl or VBScript. We advocate that beautiful code is complimented by beautiful test cases. We won’t stand off to the side with overly complex testing behemoths that no one else can drive (or pay for). We prefer to integrate with your own development environment and provide continuous integration for performance and test automation.
Web Based Testing? Get REAL!
If you’re looking to perform any kind of stress, load or performance test of your website then look no further. We’ve partnered with BrowserMob.com to provide affordable and notable differences to our closed source counterparts. Others will simulate traffic whereas we emulate real users with real browsers from multiple geographic locations around the world. This drastically simplifies the scripting and preparation requirements for your test effort.
Limited Budget?
The global financial crisis has been hard on many industry sectors. Around the world businesses are cutting back on spending and operating on slim margins. It’s more than time to take a hard look at cutting back on IT costs. Altentee will provide reliable and affordable alternatives for performance and test automation solutions. We’ll help identify where you’re spending too much money on IT infrastructure and help develop a cost structure that can scale with your business, through good times and bad. Altentee delivers performance outcomes, not bums on seats. Forget about ‘nice to haves’ and get back to the basics. Stable, reliable and well performing systems.