On the applications testing calendar, the holidays are almost here
Though the year-end holidays are a long way off in consumers’ minds, to retailers, they’re practically here. In fact, e-retailers already are starting to test the performance of applications and upgraded infrastructure developed or added over the spring and early summer to facilitate holiday shopping online – or at least, they should be, according to Dan Koloski, director of the web application test group at Empirix Inc., which provides integrated products and testing services for web, voice and network applications.
“We have customers who tell us that their traffic increases tenfold or more over the season,” Koloski says. “If retailers’ systems do not scale, they miss an opportunity that won’t come back until the next year. It’s critical for them to make sure before the holiday season that their systems will support the spike in traffic they expect.”
Some retailers have learned this the hard way. A consumer electronics retailer that eventually became an Empirix customer normally gets about 15 million visits a month, representing some 3,000 individual users on the site at any given time. During the holiday spike, however, that rose to as many as 15,000 individual users. At the top of the spike, the retailer estimated that one in five transactions was failing, based on calls to its customer service center. The error codes generated suggested e-commerce applications rather than ISP issues as the problem. Empirix ran high-volume load testing and found the error in a third-party application used to complete purchase transactions – an error that did not occur under normal user loads. The problem was diagnosed and fixed within hours, according to Empirix.
About 80% of the system and applications performance problems found in the production stage – that is, when the applications are live -- could be avoided by testing, but only about 25% of applications deployed are tested in a systematic way first, Kolosksi estimates. “We suggest retail organizations, at this time where the window of opportunity is short, focus their testing on applications in the pre-procdution environment and then again in the production environment. Many of the errors we see are configuration errors that cannot be tested before the application reaches the production stage, particularly if related to volume,” he says.
Empirix’s product, available as an on-premises license or a hosted, managed service, emulates a real user interacting with the applications – times 10,000 users, 100,000 or a million, depending on the level the application is expected to support. “Right now retailers are working through promotions, online marketing initiatives and new features of their sites that are designed to allow customers to purchase more efficiently. These will then roll out at the end of the third quarter. What they can do now is allocate a window of time prior to rollout for testing to ensure these that features will scale at the level at which they need to,” Koloski says.
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