Why Intuit Was So Confident And Ready For Tax Day
Business Challenge: Support an Unprecedented Volume of Tax Filers
A record 18.76 million taxpayers used either the desktop or online version of TurboTax this year, up 11 percent from 2008, with two-thirds of those customers filing online. As the IRS continues its efforts to increase the percentage of returns filed electronically, Intuit took proactive measures to uncover potential reliability and performance problems well before April 15.
“Site performance and stability is critical to us throughout tax season, but even more so on April 14th and 15th when traffic volumes spike as customers rush to meet the deadline,” said Dan Bartow, Senior Manager, Performance Engineering, Intuit. “Tax time is stressful enough for our customers, so our site reliability is essential in making the filing process as easy and fluid as possible for them.”
“This is the most confidence we have ever had in an Intuit system in production . . . ever!” — Sr. Manager, Performance Engineering
To that end, Intuit set quality and performance goals for the site and decided to test steadily increasing user loads, with the ultimate goal of testing at least 200% of their anticipated peak of concurrent users on tax day.
Selecting an effective and efficient performance and load testing solution to meet planned and unplanned traffic surges was extremely important to Intuit, particularly given the mission critical aspect of online filing. Intuit found that SOASTA’s CloudTest® On-Demand service met all its needs.
Intuit chose SOASTA because its CloudTest On-Demand service provided the ability to quickly and precisely replicate anticipated user load for the TurboTax site. The testing service realistically simulates a variety of unconstrained user scenarios, accurately measures site performance from load generated via the cloud, and provides granular, real time reporting to help pinpoint and address potential issues. Unlike other solutions, SOASTA’s cloud testing experts leverage the cloud to quickly and affordably simulate the real Web environment and its’ unique characteristics.
SOASTA: Delivering Confidence in TurboTax Online Performance
Intuit was keen on ensuring the TurboTax Online site was able to support high continuous use, as well as surges in user traffic as tax day neared.
Intuit used SOASTA’s proven best practices for testing what, for them, had been a previously unreachable number of virtual users. SOASTA employed an iterative approach starting with a 1,000-user test. Generating load from Amazon EC2, they ramped the volume with each subsequent test – finally reaching the test goal of 200% of their anticipated peak – all while real customers accessed the production site at the same time.
As SOASTA increased the load, different component and systems issues were uncovered and addressed in real time. During the testing process the Intuit and SOASTA team located, fixed and optimized issues with the application, load balancer settings, and log in, among others. Soon Intuit was confident that every component of their application was ready to go for tax day.
“SOASTA literally became a part of our team and had us up and testing within days,” added Bartow. “Through CloudTest we were able to quickly and efficiently gauge both performance and availability, and find and fix errors and bottlenecks that we would never have uncovered in our own test lab or with any other solution.”
The SOASTA CloudTest On-Demand service quickly detected problems and provided an accurate view of how the site would react under different levels of stress. Thanks to CloudTest and the SOASTA team, the site performed perfectly on tax day, as problems were tackled before they impacted any users. CloudTest provides web scale yet affordable load and performance testing, which allows companies to find and repair problems before their users are impacted, resulting in a superior customer experience.
