Our work on performance test tools has its 27th anniversary in 2022
Standards for improved quality assurance must be supported by performance test tools.
Performance testing and performance measurements must be done automated by performance test tools. There are two simple reasons for this:
-
For practical reasons. Applications accessible on Internet can be used by an unpredictable number of concurrent users. It's therefore impossible both practically and economically to measure the effects of real visitors by using manual testers simulating real traffic.
-
For quality reasons. Performance measurement tools ensure identical test conditions are applied and measured on the tested system time after time. This make figures for performance characteristic comparable, which is impossible to accomplish with manual testing.
Provision of in-house developed test tools since 1995.
Our first test tools were developed for a trading system at Stockholm Stock Exchange (today OMX) in 1995.
The tools enabled development with no manual testing, i.e. an early case of test automation. In the next version the test tools included daily check out at 20:00 (8 PM) and automated execution of all function test cases during the night. We believe this was in practice among the first cases of "Continuous delivery".
Mobile Benchmark Center (MBC) since 2003.
MBC, our advanced performance test tool was first introduced in 2003. From 2004 it was developed in close cooperation with our customers in the telecom market.
It has of course undergone a number of changes to meet requirements from very demanding applications during the the 18 years since introduction, but the fundamental design has never been changed. This is because MBC is architected as a system of processes communicating via internal protocols and is therefore a very modern test tool with outstanding features. The design enables, for instance, almost limitless scalability.
An early example of IMS performance testing for Service Operators can be downloaded here: MBC on IBM BladeCenter systems
Two examples of outstanding features in MBC.
Some outstanding features for demanding measurements with MBC.
The two graphs on the left side show how MBC can generate series of extreme load peaks that will expose a system to really tough conditions. With MBC it is possible to change the load from x to y transactions per second between two consecutive transaction, where x and y can be any transaction rate per second! Load changes can't be more extreme!
The two graphs on the right side show how MBC finds the system capacity of a service or a mix of services at 80% CPU load in 10 minutes with a precision of +/- 1%, a precision that is almost impossible to achieve by manual adjustments of generated load and certainly not in 10 minutes. We call this Adaptive Load Control and it also saves the need for manpower.
Read more about these and other excellent test tool solutions with MBC.
