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Have Servers, will travel |
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Business Case for Stress and Load Testing
The cost of failure of IT systems has been
estimated to reach up to $6 million per hour, according to the Gartner Group, an IT
research and consulting firm.
Only a few hours or days of downtime can result
in:
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Millions in lost sales
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Refunds of fees for content not delivered
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Customers who abandon you for competitors
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Incomplete or out of date information so
employees can’t perform their duties
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Inability to complete Disaster Recovery in
a timely manner
As Corporations continue to invest business systems,
management asks: what is the return on this investment? Whether
they are CRM, order processing, content management or other mission-critical
information systems, the ROI expected often fails to materialize. Why?
Hidden problems not identified during functional
testing don’t appear until well into implementation. Stress and Performance
testing the system is usually incomplete. Each part of the system is tested, but the system is seldom tested in
its entirety. Packaged
systems as standalones are sometimes tested for performance, but when
integrated into your legacy environment, are seldom tested in their entirety. This
can be due to many factors: cost of recreating a complete duplicate testing
environment, expertise to create and implement a complete testing series, or
the inability to interpret test results for the benefit of solving problems
before they occur.
Unplanned problems require development and
implementation lifecycles to slow or halt, increasing costs and delaying the
start of the benefits received. In
a hurry to release a system, hidden support costs and increased customer
service costs take a severe toll on the company bottom line. Taking the system
down for off-line testing just isn’t practical. “Testing it in
Given the critical nature of the systems, testing
them under “real life” equivalent conditions is emerging as the only true way to discover the limits, the performance, and
ultimately the reliability of a system.
How Stress and Performance Testing Pays for
Itself:
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Predicts and resolves problems before they
occur
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Optimizes the configuration of the system
to increase its capacity and performance
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Minimize budgets for hardware and software
needs
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Evaluating hardware and software vendors as
to how well they integrate with the existing system
Systems that typically require such tests include:
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E-commerce applications integrated with the
enterprise systems
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Intranet applications encompassing multiple
databases and servers
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Other complex environments
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Reality Test® |