Testing of a Personnel Planning Application

Customer

Child care organization in the Netherlands.

Challenge

A personnel planning system was under implementation. The system was intended to be a centralized solution covering such activities as scheduling and planning work time, planning vacation, registering medical certificates, etc. One of the system requirements was to allow completing the reports for certain number of registered users within a limited timeframe. Thus, the system, on the one hand, had to be reliable to resist to overloads when the number of concurrent users was more than expected and, on the other hand, it had to be resistant to stress situations when the hardware resources were unable to correctly process operations.

Solution

ScienceSoft assigned a team of performance engineers to investigate the current state of the application’s performance and reliability. At the initial stage, the analysis of possible bottlenecks was performed using developed load test scenarios and running measurements.

The information received from the measurements revealed the system bottlenecks such as excessive CPU usage on the application server, significant time lag between gathering and processing data from DB and sending the response to the client side, as well as memory leaks in ASP.NET code.

After several profiling sessions, the sufficient information needed to eliminate the bottlenecks was obtained and sent to the development team.

Results

Based on the valuable feedback from the testing team, the development team was able to significantly improve and optimize the business logic of data processing at the application server tier, as well as to eliminate memory leaks. All the implemented changes have improved the overall performance of the application. Subsequent performance measurements and uptime tests showed that the system became 10 times faster.

Technologies and Tools

MS WCF, XBAP, MS SQL Server, JetBrains .NET Profiler, HP/Mercury LoadRunner.