What is stress testing?
Stress testing simulates load-related demands on software or computer devices and measures responses, to determine their behaviour under anticipated normal and peak operating conditions. Its aim is to identify any problems these demands might prompt – such as unacceptably slow response times – and remedy their causes before they become apparent in practice.
Depending on customer circumstances and preferences, stress testing can even involve deliberately crashing a system, to see how well it recovers.
Stress testing normally takes place at key stages, such as after an application has been installed but is not yet rolled out and when customers add significant new users or migrate to newer versions of software or operating systems.
Why use specialist stress testing?
Professional stress testing allows us and our customers to:
Identify any critical load-related issues, arising from causes such as:
- Clients
- Application servers
- Databases
- Networks
Understand and where necessary, remediate system performance, in terms of:
- Application design
- Application build
- Infrastructure configuration
- Infrastructure capacity
- User behaviour
Professional stress testing, which can typically take two to three weeks, is preferable to the task being undertaken in-house. Undertaking this important testing with limited internal resources can often lead to some usage situations remaining unexamined and bugs being left undetected.
Why is professional SAP stress testing important for our customers?
Professional stress testing is particularly vital for mission critical software. This is because an application of this sort being overloaded and crashing, for example, could have disastrous consequences for a customer, such as having to halt production in a factory or losing important data forever.
Also, the professional stress testing systems we offer accurately simulate all aspects of the intended operating environment and are therefore more effective and provide greater peace of mind than inferior methods involving merely theoretical or analytical modelling, for example.
Who is our specialist partner, Itexis?
Opal Wave has arranged several successful performance tests on some of the largest SAP BPC applications in the UK and Europe. We have done this in partnership with independent experts Itexis, who provide global-leading performance test loading and monitoring technologies, plus consulting capability.
Itexis, which has 20 years’ experience and has worked successfully for hundreds of businesses, is an award-winning organisation. It has developed the innovative AppsLoad®, AppsMon® and AppsTiming® technologies, to simulate user actions and recognise events at the graphic level.
The company’s customers range from large corporates to small and medium-sized businesses, including software vendors, value-added resellers and integrators. Its technology provides reassurance to businesses in all relevant circumstances at every stage, from proof of concept to post-implementation application monitoring.
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