Reducing business risk

How is your application going to work when dozens or hundreds of users are using it at the same time?

When organisations open their business-critical applications up to internal or external users, it is critically important to guarantee that the applications they are using have been thoroughly tested. Functional or regression testing is essential for proving whether or not an application works in isolation. But this is only half of the story. Load testing completes the picture.

It is vitally important to understand how an application is going to work when a large number of users are working simultaneously. Downtime and slow performance caused by unmanageable load will irritate users and affect productivity – but it will drive away impatient customers or potential customers. There are real bottom-line implications in both.

Real-life scenarios

Load testing has an important role to play in any mature company. But organisations must test their systems against real-life scenarios to produce practical and worthwhile results.

Generally, load testing tools simply place artificial load on various points of the system at specific moments in time. But this just gives a ‘snapshot’ view of the system under stress, rather than the whole picture.

‘Real-life’ load testing involves simulating the actions of actual users. Companies need to simulate multiple users working with different parts of the application under test, entering different data, at what might be considered ‘normal’ data entry speeds – and simultaneously.

The only native iSeries load testing solution

TestLoad is the only iSeries-specific automated load testing solution. It simulates actual system performance as well as placing artificial load on the network, monitoring and capturing Batch activity, server jobs and green-screen activity.

This means that you can create specific load test scenarios that are truly representative of real world activity, as opposed to simply capturing network traffic for a point in time, which may or may not be representative of the load you are trying to represent.

The TestLoad bundle includes services to help you to define your load testing requirement, set up and maintain your load testing ‘pack’, and deliver results that will help you determine the nature and scale of any hardware or software shortcomings.

More information

  Read an article about load testing (featuring Original Software) on the IT Jungle website.

  For more about our iSeries load testing solution and to request a demo, please click here.

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