Peeks Preserved with E-business Testing

Software Magazine, June, 1999 by Elizabeth U. Harding

Had Victoria's Secret done some load testing before putting their latest fashion show over the 'Net via streaming video, they may have avoided disappointing the many people who couldn't logon.

Victoria's Secret is not the only prominent site that has run out of bandwidth. The Superbowl site had a similar problem.

Testing has become very important in e-business, says Diane Hagglund, senior product manager for e-business testing, Mercury Interactive Corp., Sunnyvale, Calif. "The cost of failure can be high," she says. "You want to test your application to make sure that it is reliable, that you can deploy it with confidence, and that the site will perform as expected."

Issues concerning e-business applications are performance, scalability, and adapting to change. You should be looking for a download time of 3 to 5 seconds per page, even during heavy user load, according to Hagglund.

Another issue is that the Web site content changes rapidly. "The deployment cycle of our customers has gone from one year in client/server to three months for Web applications," says Hagglund. For some, the cycle is days.

Mercury holds about 42% of market share according to The Yankee Group, Boston. One important differentiator is that Mercury's LoadRunner tool tests any application, including the Web and custom client/server applications.