Tag Archive for ‘Web testing’ rss

The Dawn of a New Shopping Season

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Nov 29, 2011. Leave a Comment

As Thanksgiving Eve, Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, the momentum is palpable as eager shoppers gear up to take advantage of all those well-advertised holidays sales. For many retailers, as much as 60% of their annual revenues are dependent on the next six weeks. No mistakes are permissible; inventories have to be stocked, clerks must be ready to assist everyone and anyone, and most importantly, the technology supporting sales operations must work.

In fact, technology is at the core of a successful holiday shopping season as a growing number of consumers go online, stressing applications, infrastructure and networks. The most dedicated shoppers began shopping online in earnest before Thanksgiving — to the tune of $9.7 billion according to a report released last week by comScore.

Faulty technology can cause retailers to lose millions of seasonal dollars. If a retailer’s web site fails, shoppers pursue alternatives. And today there are more retail options then ever before, those options being only two clicks away. So, retail friends, if your site is not easy to use and the buying experience is not simple and fast, it’s likely that you’re losing sales.

Many retailers spent this year making over their web sites and are using some of the coolest technologies to highlight their holiday season product offerings. As hip as these features are, they could, in fact, crash a site or deliver a not-so-positive user experience. This year, at least six of the top ten retailers have prepared their web properties for the online shopping season.

These savvy consumer brands spent months testing these new technologies and apps. They tested and re-tested new functionality on every consumer-facing application hundreds of times. They also began to embrace cloud testing techniques to simulate millions of customers buying leading brands via iPads, iPhones and Android. And they did this all to ensure that their user experience is easy and fast.

It’s has been a long summer for most retail development and test teams. Showtime is here! Good luck to the retail community; we wish you a prosperous holiday season. And, to all you consumers: enjoy the new sites and the high performance that they will deliver.

 

QTRAX Leverages the Cloud to Test Web Site

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Feb 12, 2009. Leave a Comment

QTRAX is a very exciting new Web site that enables users to download songs for FREE. They announced today that they have significantly expanded the number of songs/artists that are now available to their 300,000 registered users. The number of users is certain to grow in the coming months as word gets out about QTRAX. The potential for a significant burst of new demand is a very “real and present danger” for their CTO Chris Roe. The issue centers around Web performance.  Web performance is customer service for QTRAX. If the site has any latency issues or crashes, they are certain to lose customers, and they can’t afford to do so. How exactly do you prepare for the potential of one million users hitting your site when the new Springsteen song is released? Traditionally you would not. Mostly because you would need over 1,000 servers to simulate that kind of traffic to test your site before you went into production. Who has the money to do that? So, Chris had to look outside the box, and ended up choosing a test solution in the “Clouds”.

More specifically, Chris looked at the power, elasticity, and affordability of  Cloud Computing to test his Web site. Basically, leveraging the “Web” as the test platform for testing his Web site. By partnering with SOASTA and using CloudTest On-Demand, QTRAX recently simulated over 500,000 users (originating from around the world) downloading songs from their site.  Perhaps even more significant, they all hit the site at the same time. If just having this kind of test platform at your fingertips was not enough, he did it for only a few thousands dollars . . .  a fraction of what it would have cost using traditional test tools and a hardwired, proprietary test data center.  He also achieved a far greater level of quality results because he used the Web as his test platform. The same platform that he was using to deploy.  Of course, Chris still worries about his Web performance, but at a lesser degree had he not not tested at all (and if he did, certainly not at the kind levels of that he has these past few months). As Chris says, “Cloud testing is forever changing how all of us our testing our Web sites”.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

Chegg.com Goes Back to School With Cloud Testing

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Feb 06, 2009. Leave a Comment

One of the hottest areas for cloud computing these days is the Education marketplace.  The easy access and affordability of cloud computing has every university looking at it as a new deployment vehicle for their student portals.  Cloud service providers, such as Chegg.com, are also emerging.  Chegg.com is an online destination for college students to rent textbooks.  With textbook legislation recently approved by Congress and online use 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 expects to service up to 25,000 students at one time, which more than quadruples the current capacity for processing students’ orders.

With this level of demand, Chegg recently came to SOASTA for some help performance testing their Web site in preparation for “Textbook Tuesday” which is expected to be the biggest day for online book rentals. Chegg.com looked to SOASTA to load test its recently updated Web site to determine if they were ready to go live and meet the anticipated increase in traffic volume.

Osman Rashid, CEO of Chegg explained it this way to me.  ”Our business rides on our Web site — it is our sales channel. We need to be available and reliable no matter if we are servicing the first or last customer. 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 the bottlenecks and were able to troubleshoot our network and application in real time. It was easy, it was affordable and it was fast.”

Looks like nothing has changed since I was in school.   Students are once again leading the way into new markets . . . by having their “Heads in the CLOUD”.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

Traditional Vendors Out, New Players Emerge in Cloud Testing

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jan 30, 2009. Leave a Comment

Every recession over the past 30 years has proven to be a forcing function for significant technological change.  In good times, corporations can get a bit careless or lose focus. However, in bad times, corporations go to great lengths to find new levels of cost efficiency in their operations . . . even if it means changing processes and technology that they had used for many years.  This recession is no different, change is beginning to happen, and traditional software vendors are the prime targets. The traditional “License” model employed by traditional software vendors is officially dead with this recession. The “Software as a Service” business model or even more specifically, the “Pay for Use” model, have emerged as clear winners.  IDC recently raised its 2009 projections for the SaaS market. They now expect this segment to grow by more than 40% this year.  This business model shift, coupled with the emergence of the new deployment platform of Cloud Computing will make it very difficult for traditional vendors to maintain their thrones.

Take my business, the test marketplace.  Our market was long dominated by Mercury Interactive which was bought by HP several years ago.   Mercury’s LoadRunner was the ideal tool for testing client-server applications in the late 80′s and 90′s, and its success drove Mercury to its leadership position under a license-based model.  However, a license model that was very expensive ($30k/Test Hour). Today, the world has changed for HP/Mercury. We are all now developing and deploying new and much more dynamic Web applications for consumers around the world. Mercury’s technology, business, and deployment model are looking a bit like Tom Jones performing at a Beyonce concert . . . a little out of place. New test vendors are beginning to emerge as the new leaders of the Cloud Testing market.  This includes new players like SOASTA that deliver a “pay only for test time used” ($1k/Test Hour).  Companies like these are greatly reducing the cost of testing while even enabling more and better quality testing. This is an example of another changing of the guard, made possible by another down economic period and a requirement for greater reliability.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

Genentech Tests Cloud Computing

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jan 29, 2009. Leave a Comment

As Michael Liedtke of Associated Press reported last week, and subsequently now we can also report, that indeed Genentech has migrated its 16,000 employee’s to Google Apps for its email and for some office suite applications. However, the more interesting back story to this article was before they made the decision, Genentech wanted to ensure that Google would scale. Google . . . scale?  That’s right they questioned what kind of user experience there employees would have when accessing applications deployed in a cloud. To get comfortable, Genentech decided to do some Cloud Testing using SOASTA’s new On Demand CloudTest Service. Over the course of a couple weeks Genentech were able to test several different user scenarios including having 16,000 simulated Genentech employees hitting Google Calendar at the same instant.  The testing went well, and the rest is history. Genentech has dipped their big toe into the Cloud Landscape, and by all the feedback we have received,  it went very well.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

Cloud Computing is Changing How we Test Web Sites Forever!

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jan 28, 2009. Leave a Comment

Okay, I know I’m biased, but as the rest of the blogging world focuses their attention on the “Cloud Platform Wars”, debating endlessly on which Cloud platform vendor will emerge as the “winner” in the coming years, quietly, several companies (from young start-ups to enterprise class) are leveraging the access, availability and affordability of Cloud Computing for testing their Web sites.  Even more amazingly, they are testing without even considering which Cloud platform they are using.  They are Cloud Testing!

Load, Performance, and Stress testing Web sites has been a black art of Web development shops for years. . . requiring a huge amount of compute power, expertise, and expensive system and test software. The total cost of Performance testing has reached an estimated $30,000/test hour. . . making testing costs prohibitive for most companies. That is, until Cloud Testing emerged in 2008.

Now companies are leveraging the limitless power of Cloud Computing to simulate Web (scale) traffic to test their sites before going into LIVE production. They are greatly reducing the occurrences of performance related errors, latency, and actual site crashes while reducing the cost of testing down to $1,000/test hour.

So, while the rest of the world tries to figure out whether or not Cloud Computing is for real, we are seeing many customers seeking a higher level of reliability for their web sites,  at a lower cost, finding a real value proposition in Cloud Computing.

Cloud Testing is Changing How we Test Web Sites Forever!

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

SOASTA Performs 500th Cloud Test

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jan 27, 2009. Leave a Comment

It seems like ten years have past since our first Cloud Test, but last night we hit the 500th test milestone with a test for Hallmark.com.   An amazing stress test that lasted a little over an hour and simulated over 600,000 users hitting their site.  The analytics (1 TB) were amazing in their detail of how the site and network would perform in live production.   Looking back at our first test,  we were so inexperienced in this new method of testing.  We had no idea what Cloud Computing would bring to Web testing.   It has been an amazing year of discovery and experience.  In the end, we once again re-discovered the point of testing is not in the ability to run a test….but the real point of testing is in the Results and Analytics that the test produces. Cloud Testing is changing testing forever. Thank you to all of our very loyal customers!

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

If Cloud Computing is The New Destination, Then Where does the Journey Begin?

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jan 23, 2009. Leave a Comment

Which Applications You Should Move to the Cloud

Over the past year, there has been much discussion over the cost benefits of Cloud Computing.  Companies such as Amazon, Rackspace, Google, and SalesForce all introduced Cloud platforms in 2008 that stirred our imaginations and our hopes of a more cost effective and efficient way to deliver Web applications. By virtue of the amount of vendor activity and general buzz, it is pretty clear that Cloud Computing may be the right delivery platform given our current economic environment.  That said, it also has its critics, who site that using the Cloud as a platform for “real world” enterprise applications has some issues.  Many believe that it is unproven in the areas of data security and platform stability and reliability.  But even to critics it remains a compelling alternative.   So, if Cloud Computing is at the very least “a” destination platform for delivering Web applications…what types of applications make the most sense to make the journey to the Cloud?

Cloud Testing vendor SOASTA, has been in a very unique, first-hand position of observing how early adopters of the Cloud have made their decision as to which applications they would move and why.   For the past six months, SOASTA has been Cloud Testing hundreds of Web applications from a wide variety of industries such as consumer products, mobile, social networking, and financial services.   These companies range from small start-ups to the enterprise (i.e. Hallmark, Genentech, Proctor & Gamble, Qtrax, Pelago)—all seeking ways to reduce costs of delivery by using the Cloud.

From this experience, we see the following types of applications as the forerunners in moving to the Cloud:

Sales & Marketing Applications: these are applications that center around a one-time activity such as a marketing campaign for a new product or the preparation for a holiday (i.e. an influx of e-cards or flower delivery on Valentine’s Day).  A recent event that could have benefitted from Cloud Testing was the US Presidential Inauguration. Hundreds of millions of people turned to the Internet to watch the event, causing many site outages or failures.  The characteristics of this type of Web application that make them Cloud-worthy are:
a.    Event-driven, tied to a specific time period or date
b.    Large Load (Scale), Web traffic is unknown and must be met
c.    Variable Load, prone to web traffic spikes or surges
d.    Global, used by a widely distributed audience
e.    Media Rich, employ a high level of dynamic content such as Ajax or Flash and subsequently may require more compute power

Composite Applications: these are applications that typically aggregate data services such as RSS feeds from many sources into one application. Common composite applications include Priceline, NASDAQ and Facebook. The Cloud has proven to be a very a low cost, easy-to-use, aggregation and deployment platform.

Collaborative Applications: these are applications that have many of the same attributes the previous two applications.  These are typically shared or group applications with high potential for scale and spikes in Web traffic, global users, and dynamic content. They often require shared access and availability to large amounts of compute power. Because they are not typically revenue-generating applications, they are ideally suited for a low cost delivery platform such as the Cloud.  Salesforce.com, eBay, Youtube, and some Wikis, fit this category.

The final analysis suggests that every application has unique deployment requirements and that Cloud Computing offers many companies a low cost alternative.  SOASTA’s own application, CloudTest, leverages Cloud Computing to simulate real world Web traffic for testing Web applications and networks. Testing has less of a requirement for secure or portable data than most transaction-oriented applications. It negates some of the common concerns and is ideally suited for the Cloud.  In the end, companies should choose the deployment platform that fits their application’s specific requirements and not judge every application as having the same requirements.

Cloud Computing is quickly establishing itself as a viable delivery platform. The real question remains…for which applications?  Proving once again that it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey.   Let the journey begin.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

Web Performance is Customer Service

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jan 23, 2009. Leave a Comment

Cloud Testing is a Solution to the Problem


Fact, there are over 162 million registered Web sites today, yet only 15% (estimated) of them have had any actual Load Testing done to them. Which means all of us consumers are being used as the digital version of “Crash Test Dummies”. You have to ask yourself . . . doesn’t service matter to Web 2.0 companies?

Surely, companies like Amazon, FaceBook, Apple, and Netflix care about their Internet customers as much or more than traditional storefront companies do. After all, most of the time these are their “only” customers.

So why would they risk a customer experience that leaves a potential user/customer without service for hours, or perhaps worse waiting for 20 seconds as a new page is downloaded? Every year Business Week publishes its Annual List of “Top 10 Companies for Customer Service”.  Lists like these typically highlight traditional retail companies, and focus their evaluations on the performance of their sales or customer support telephone staffs. But, as we all move to the Internet to buy our goods and services, what happens to customer service on the Internet?

Given that the Internet is largely a self-service business, you may question just what  “good service” is to a Web user. Latency may be one of the barometers as to what defines what we should expect as good service from our Web sites. A recent report states that Amazon estimates it loses 1% in sales if their site experiences more then 100ms in latency. In another report Google states it loses up to 20% of its traffic to a page if that page takes more then a .5 seconds to load. Then there are actual web site crashes . . . companies like Skype have had very public crashes which there site crippled for hours.

So why are these sites failing, haven’t they been tested? Well, yes and no. They have been tested functionally, but very few companies actually do stress testing of their Web sites and applications. The problem is that it has become virtually impossible and too expensive to simulate or exceed real-world Web traffic in an internal test lab. Thus, Load Testing of Web sites, if done at all, is done in a very limited way (i.e. on average companies test less then 10% of there expected web traffic). Which means for all of us Internet surfers, strap on your Crash Helmets, and prepare to be frustrated with your carrier, your device, and with your service provider as you’re about to become the main resource testing how well their web sites perform.

But don’t despair too long. A new way to simulate real world scenarios is here and it’s called Cloud Testing. This new way of testing Web applications and networks leverages Cloud Computing to simulate Web traffic, and does so at a fraction of the cost of traditional testing methods. What used to cost millions of dollars now costs a few thousand for a few hours of testing. It’s fast, easy, and affordable and provides great insight to how applications will actually run in the real world. n the future there should be a new list of “Top Services Companies”. These companies should be recognized for as having the best customer service record for the Internet. That will be largely tied to their web performance. I suspect the winners will be using Cloud Testing.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

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