Background
Carlisle Homes undertook a major implementation to develop a mobile application solution to provision its field personnel (supervisors) with a streamlined process to carry out their daily operational interactions with the existing back office Microsoft ERP Dynamics AX system.
The mobile solution was launched following a “ramp-up” approach to transition field personnel and projects onto the new system. Observations from early use of the system was fairly stable performance wise. However, month 3 started to unravel performance issues with the Dynamics AX system when capacity reached approximately 75%.
The performance issues and bottleneck were identified to be related to the information parsing between third-party API’s and Dynamics AX. The severity of this issue impacted the integrity and accuracy of the data.
Context
Carlisle Homes IT project team undertook two (2) major streams of work:
1.Infrastructure optimisation i.e. how to ramp up “on-prem” service and capacity to advance the performance of AX (faster processing)
2.Performance tuning of the web services (between interfaces and AX),
Requirement
Carlisle engaged Testpoint to build and deliver a configurable and repeatable automated performance testing framework that can run on demand to execute the required performance testing configuration and requirements to validate the performance and response times of the key systems and interfaces in question.
Solution
The engagement was to build a performance test framework to validate the performance the target applications in accordance to the following key areas:
- Capacity – Point of Performance degradation
- Reliability – Stability of the system under anticipated work load
- Acceptance – Is the system production ready
The framework was build and deployed to address the following objectives:
- simple configurable to support various load profile requirements (orchestrations)
- readily available to support on demand performance test requests
- accessible and extensible by Carlisle IT Project team
Outcome
Testpoint delivered a performance testing framework which was run on demand and supported with the required configuration and capacity to verify system performance on demand.
Engage Phase – Develop Performance Test Plan/Strategy and KPIs
- Workshops, Meetings & Risk Profiling
- Identify Performance Use Case
- Build Strategy and Plan
- Data Planning
- Performance Test Consideration & Planning
Enrich Phase – Deploy Performance Test Capability (Dev & Test)
- Configured Test Environment
- Deployed Vansah Synthetics & Automated Testing Platform
- Deployed SVP Framework
- Captured key Test Cases, Data, Sequences, Scripts
- Environment Shakedown
- Performance Test & Build
Achievement: Performance Testing Framework, Capability and Test artefacts delivered, reviewed and signed-off by Carlisle Homes stakeholders
