Client Overview

The client is a leading University in the United States that offers a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate programs. With more than 70,000 enrollments, they have been serving and delivering content, digital information services and course–driven training programs for instructors, students and other academic bodies, effectively transforming the learning experience.

Business Needs and Objectives

Our client, one of the biggest universities in the U.S., was in the process of moving their PeopleSoft architecture to virtual environments, as well as upgrading Human Resources and Campus Solutions from PeopleSoft 9.0 to PeopleSoft 9.1. To optimize their new hardware for both capacity and throughput, the University contacted Qualitest to design a load testing strategy for both products.

A web-based portal and PeopleSoft ERP had to be performance tested using different load volumes. The initial estimations posed a challenge, with aggressive schedules for a go-live date. Concerns had been raised about the new infrastructure and the software’s ability to perform at least as well as the current environment.

Qualitest was asked to review the system and provide confidence that the rollout would be able to cope with the expected number of student enrollments. 8,000 students must be able to enroll within 30 minutes, while providing acceptable performance.

The Qualitest Solution

At Qualitest, our team of performance engineering professionals understands core elements to assure the system’s performance and meet or exceed its goals and requirements, now and in the future.

The key aspects of performance testing is to identify the bottlenecks at application and hardware level and to ensure that the system meets essential performance requirements as provided by the customer.

Qualitest provided end-to-end performance testing solutions, starting with tool evaluation, recommendation and load testing. The chosen tool for this project was LoadRunner. Load profiling was performed to ensure the users were ramped up step by step to find the maximum load that was preferable for the existing environment.

Qualitest ensured that all relevant metrics within each layer of the technology stack were able to be monitored and recorded. Qualitest engineers then performed detailed analysis on the exact frequency and type of transactions that would occur during peak enrollment periods, and defined acceptable response times.

  • Performance profiling was completed to ensure the system response time’s and utilization resources were within an encouraging limit and within the SLA, as provided by the client.
  • The approach has been designed in such a way as to identify the issues and to concentrate on each of the metrics individually. This allowed for better optimization and tuning of the hardware, among other resources, before the go-live date.
  • Recommendations were made to tune the systems for better application performance.

Key Benefits

Major achievements were accomplished by Qualitest, including:

  • Quality: Tuning recommendations were provided to the client in order for the application to meet the expected number of users without any performance issues.
  • Cost: Optimized tools were selected to fit the project objectives, resulting in cost reduction.
  • Time: Although it was a tight timeline, the project was completed as planned and the applications went live as expected.

The setup of all aspects of the Access Adelaide architecture were reviewed against best practices, resulting in the following:

  • Identified and resolved the cause of the performance bottleneck
  • Provided expertise to resolve issues such as not being able to install PeopleSoft Performance Monitor
  • Identified application and hardware needs
  • Provided confidence that the system would work under loads

After numerous iterations of load testing, Qualitest was able to deliver much improved performance and scalability, successfully providing the University with confidence that their system would effectively cope with peak enrollment loads.