www.intuit.com
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“This is the most confidence we have ever had in an Intuit system in production . . . ever!” -- Dan Bartow, Sr. Manager, Performance Engineering |
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.”
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.
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.
www.youcastrsports.com
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“Using CloudTest as our testing lab helps us significantly improve the reliability of our website and broadcasting system by providing extremely flexible tools that allow us to automatically test our entire system every time we check in our code.” -- Matt Hodgson, CTO |
“Match Test Speed with Development Speed to Assure Superior Functionality and Performance”
YouCastr Sports is a sports broadcasting service that makes it easy for high school and youth sports teams and tournaments to broadcast video of their games over the Internet to family, alumni, and fans. YouCastr Sports also gives schools, clubs, and tournaments the ability to make money through charging their viewers (pay per view) and inserting advertising.
In the current challenging economic environment, school athletic directors and principals are finding YouCastr Sports a great way to support their budgets. Additionally, YouCastr Sports provides an easy way for coaches to exchange game videos, raise the profile of their programs, and is a great educational activity for students.
With the popularity of their network growing daily, YouCastr Sports wanted to ensure they had optimal functionality on all major browsers and broadcasting systems. As different browsers have different issues and the network relies heavily on Adobe Flash, YouCastr Sports needed to test their site daily.
YouCastr Sports wanted to perform continuous site upgrades and releases and needed a testing process that was directly tied to their rapid development schedule. YouCastr Sports selected SOASTA to provide functional testing of its web site and broadcasting system. The ability to build and execute functional tests against different browsers and Flash versions in order to do end to end system testing was key. YouCastr Sports wanted a method that was quick, easy and did not require testers to have a deeply technical background. They utilize SOASTA CloudTest daily for a complete functional testing as new code is checked in. SOASTA CloudTest has helped YouCastr Sports immediately find JavaScript, Ajax, and Flash issues as they crop up allowing them to respond immediately to web site problems that might prevent end users from accessing the site and using the broadcasting system. YouCastr Sports has improved the quality of their web site significantly and just recently integrated SOASTA CloudTest fully into its integration server, further automating the testing process.
www.chegg.com
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“All we had to do was give SOASTA our URL, let them know what we wanted to test, and SOASTA took care of the rest. Within the first hour we started seeing results and were able to troubleshoot our network and application in real time. It was easy, it was affordable and it was fast.” -- Osman Rashid, CEO |
“Ensure Reliability of Updated Web Site in Time for Spring 2009 ‘Textbook Tuesday’ Rush”
As the leading online destination for college textbook rentals, Chegg.com has saved students at 4,000 plus campuses nationwide, well over 30 million dollars on the cost of textbooks. As a pure online business, its Web performance is heavily tied to customer service and an exceptional user experience. A few months prior to the start of the Spring 2009 semester, Chegg.com continued to progress its Web site with new functionality in order to better meet the rush of “Textbook Tuesday”, the biggest day for online book rentals. With textbook legislation recently approved by Congress and online textbook shopping at an all time high, students are embracing the ease of use and the tremendous cost savings of renting textbooks online. Due to high demand, Chegg.com expected to service up to 25,000 students at one time. Realizing that even the slightest change or update to their Web presence could impact performance, Chegg.com proactively sought to ensure the continued availability and reliability of their web site as they prepared to meet the anticipated increase in traffic and provide customer the very best shopping experience.
“Our business rides on our web site,” said Osman Rashid, CEO of Chegg.com. “We need to be available and reliable no matter how many customers we are servicing.” Chegg.com turned to SOASTA and its CloudTest On-Demand service to load test their site. CloudTest On-Demand generated load by provisioning servers from a leading Cloud environment. They then directed that traffic to the Chegg.com site and ran load tests that gauged page response rate and simulated varying levels of simultaneous users (10K to 15K to 25K to 35K users). With each test, performance levels increased and error rate decreased to approximately zero. With CloudTest On-Demand, Chegg.com was able to quickly understand how their application and their network would perform in production before going live. Chegg.com passed the test and their customers benefited from a reliable shopping environment.
www.activision.com
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“We knew that many companies had recently experienced performance issues with their Web sites. Our new site was an important change in our marketing strategy so it was crucial that we measure the capacity and performance to ensure the best user experience possible.” -- Niel Armstrong, CIO |
“Launch a cool new Web site with media-rich content as part of the Holiday 2007 product launch”
With just a month to go before the 2007 holiday season, Activision prepared to launch the newest edition of its biggest selling game, “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.” After two incredibly successful years with Guitar Hero I and II, Guitar Hero III was expected to be the cornerstone of their holiday season. In planning for the 2007 holiday season, Activision decided to make a shift in their marketing strategy. This year, they wanted to use the Internet to help them reach the millions of loyal Guitar Hero fans. The Internet had previously proven to be a very powerful tool for promoting many other Activision games, but they had never used it for such a large or important launch. But, with only a few days remaining before the start of the shopping season, tensions were running high when they realized time was running out and they had not yet tested the new Web site that would carry the Guitar Hero III video promo. What would happen if the site was hit by a large number of users at once? Would the site crash under stress? Would the user experience be compromised and cause prospective buyers to get frustrated and give up trying to view the video that took months to develop?
“We needed help,” said Niel Armstrong, CIO of Activision. “We had very little time and lacked experienced engineers who could test a site so dynamic and of this magnitude.” Activision called upon SOASTA and its SOASTA CloudTest automated testing solution for help. Within two days, one person with limited experience fully tested the new Activision site. Potentially serious technical issues were uncovered within one hour of the SOASTA CloudTest testing process. As a result, many issues were resolved that could have had serious effects on the customer experience. Activision was able to implement the required changes in time to meet their marketing kickoff. A huge amount of potential customers visited their site on the day of the launch and it handled the traffic with great performance. Activision went on to have an incredible holiday season with Guitar Hero III leading the way and named the best selling video game in a single calendar year. Today, Activision uses SOASTA to test its site 7x24, 365 days a year. “There’s no question about it, if we were forced to use traditional testing solutions, we would not have been able to test our site as quickly or as thoroughly as we were able to do with SOASTA CloudTest.”
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©2009 SOASTA, Inc