Read more
GH Tester in the US
Summary
Performance testing is generally laborious and time-consuming, and in the past, required the creation of custom applications. GH Tester contains built-in performance measuring tools, enabling detailed reports to be created at the click of a mouse. One US customer was very impressed with their evaluation of these facilities within the product and the speed at which Green Hat support dealt with enquiries. They have subsequently purchased a number of copies.
Details
In early January, a US based customer needed to perform some wide-ranging tests on their TIBCO installation. Information was required on performance of their system with different message sizes. Furthermore, the performance of individual adapters in terms of response times needed to be measured. Before GH Tester was available, an exercise such as this would require some bespoke development by the customer. This introduces many problems, described below.
When measuring the performance of an adapter, the clock needs to be started at the point where the message leaves and stopped at the point the message returns. Even then, there needs to be the realisation that this includes the propagation time down through the network transport, across the network, and up again into the adapter. This delay is experienced by any application trying to use TIBCO Rendezvous to communicate with the adapter, so it is legitimate to include in the measurement. (Note GH Tester includes a "mirror" adapter to allow measurement of this propagation time, and thus offset any readings taken).
The customer wanted to send a series of messages to the adapter and measure the response time on each occasion, generating a detailed report for each iteration. GH Tester provides this functionality straight out-of-the-box without any additional development. Using this facility, the customer was able to view their report instantly. Before the customer discovered GH Tester, they had scheduled a few weeks for the performance testing. With GH Tester, they could collapse this down to a few hours.
A further benefit to the customer of using GH Tester lies in its unique "test" facility. A GH Tester "test" includes the details of the expected reply message, so GH Tester can examine the structure of the message and report any anomalies. Any field that does not contain the expected contents will be reported, so not only can GH Tester measure the performance but it can also measure the accuracy of the data received.
In many projects, performance testing is postponed until the end of the project. This can be extremely costly if it uncovers major issues in large adapters that then require a re-write. The major reason for leaving it until the end of the project is, of course, the hassle. GH Tester allows you to run and re-run the performance test as often as you like, and even provides a well-formatted report for pasting into a larger testing report document.
Our US based customer is now happily using the product and has suggested a few improvements, all of which have been incorporated into the next release and provided back as a beta in a matter of days.
Results
The customer has saved time and effort on this project and on future ones to come, as there is no need to build custom software to do performance testing. The use of GH Tester allows performance to be measured frequently and early in the process, removing nasty surprises when the system is deployed. Through the use of adapter unit tests, performance bottlenecks can be identified and eliminated very early on in the development process.