Mindreef

Performance testing business applications has traditionally been the domain of performance and testing experts and often occurs late in the development cycle. The tools commonly used are expensive, hardware-intensive, and complex to setup and use. The people who can make the most effective use of the technical tools are not the ones who best know the business transactions. With enough brute force effort, translation from one domain to another can happen, but only periodically and very likely not at the pace of change required in an agile organization. This contributes to the ongoing disconnect of IT from business, a challenge SOA is expected to help fix.

Without addressing common barriers to improved performance testing, services and consuming applications will fail to meet required service levels and user expectations. By aligning performance testing practices with the goals of the business, SOA projects can avoid common performance problems and realize more of their potential.

Ideally, organizations should leverage their existing project team and development/testing environment to address performance and load testing. This puts the tools in the hands of the people who can do the most good, by finding and addressing performance issues long before they are delivered to the performance testing team where they are much more difficult and costly to pinpoint. This implies a major change to the performance and load testing approach, as well as the usability and cost-effectiveness of the tools. 

Mindreef Load Check - included in SOAPscope Server and SOAPscope Tester - reduces the technical complexity and the costs associated with performance and load checking; it allows developers and QA testers to perform comprehensive load testing on Web services early and often throughout the development lifecycle:

• Load Check provides visibility - across the project and management team - to critical problem areas that require early attention before they are entrenched into to the architecture:
  •  It displays load tests results in a real-time chart during execution, making it easy to monitor.
  • Test result reports summarizing the results are available immediately after the test completes
  • Reports can also be generated in PDF format, for sharing with the entire team.

With Mindreef Load Check, the code delivered by the development and testing team to the performance team is free of the fundamental architectural issues that are typically coded in during development, badly impacting system performance and/or scalability, and difficult to change either due to system complexities or time-to-market issues.