Performance and Capacity Planning

I. Merger of Financial Service Companies

Challenge: When an industry leader in diversified financial services merged with a large insurance com-
pany, their senior management anticipated that the existing separate computer systems would be over-
whelmed by the projected growth in new business as a result of the merger. As an added complication,
neither organization had significant capabilities in application and database performance testing archi-
tecture, execution, or test environment creation. Furthermore, as a result of the merger, the IT employees
were typically taxed with long hours and many weekends prior to new production releases.

Solution: SQA created a Custom Made Team that worked closely with this client on a number of per-
formance testing projects. The SQA team used their knowledge of existing tools and services to help
the client create a new set of testing processes, a new test environment, and a new performance testing
organization.

In addition, SQA worked with the new organization to implement performance testing for all new service
releases.

Impact: The new approach to performance testing allowed our client to identify and remove perfor-
mance bottlenecks so that the company could seamlessly handle the new volume of business. The new
tools, test processes and test environments allowed the company to eliminate data conversions that typi-
cally forced employees to work throughout entire weekends.

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II. software Development Company

Challenge: This client develops web-based project collaboration software, but was unable to effectively
execute performance testing in part because they lacked in-house expertise.

Solution: SQA implemented a form of in-house outsourcing in which we took complete responsibility
for performance testing through the life of the development process, while at the same time utilizing the
clients internal test environments. To prevent last minute performance surprises, SQA architects worked
closely with the development and test teams to implement performance testing against various early
builds of the product.

Impact: The scalability and stress testing implemented by SQA at various stages of the product develop-
ment life cycle enabled our client to scale their service from 3 to 40 concurrent users, which was well
within the demands expected for their target market.

P e r f o r m a n c e a n d C a pa c i t y P l a n n i n g | CA S E S T U DIE S 1
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III. retail Brokerage Firm

Challenge: This clients service level agreements made it critical that functionality, performance and
scalability of a new online trading application would meet their business requirements. The client was
also losing confidence in the application when the outsourced development vendor communicated con-
flicting performance reports on a number of occasions.

Solution: SQA first defined and implemented an automated testing architecture and process for the
performance of complete functional, load, stress and limit testing on the application. These efforts pro-
vided independent third-party performance results that directly contradicted the quality and performance
claims of the development vendor.

We worked closely with the vendor, continuously communicating the information gained from our ongo-
ing testing, which drove quality improvements in the implementation prior to release.

Impact: Our client was able to successfully release the application into production, meeting-and at times
exceeding-contracted service level agreements.

P e r f o r m a n c e a n d C a pa c i t y P l a n n i n g | CA S E S T U DIE S 2