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Testing
in Internet Time How does the world's largest professional services organization develop an e-consumer confidence site at "Internet Speed" without sacrificing quality? By utilizing the expertise of strong partners in the Internet verification space. Reducing the time to deployment and the increasing demand for a better quality project led the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) BetterWeb sm Program to choose the service experts at TestPros and best-of-breed solution from RadView to test their new Web application. By providing a fully integrated testing solution, TestPros, using automated tools from RadView Software provided PwC with Internet quality verification more efficiently. Identifying problems early in the development cycle through comprehensive iterative testing saved money, and provided for a quick and flawless launch of their e-service portal.
Every time a company launches a new Web offering, the price of failure can be immense. The company is putting possesive reputation at risk and chancing negative impact to customer loyalty. For a Big Five consultant launching a service portal, the stakes are even higher. "No where is a company's image more at risk than when launching a cutting edge e-service in a short time." says Kevin Murray, Vice President of Operations at TestPros. "A valuable benefit like the PwC BetterWeb will draw large volumes of customers on the first day it goes live. Knowing that the Web application can sustain the traffic while maintaining a quality experience for the customer is invaluable assurance. The time and money spent verifying performance, scalability and integrity is a direct investment in PwC’s reputation of excellence. PricewaterhouseCoopers needed Internet quality of service assurance. They knew they had to support a large number of concurrent users on the day the site was launched. They wanted to identify bottlenecks that could increase the response time by more than 8 seconds. They knew that they wanted this site to be a reliable service for their customers. The experts at TestPros provided PwC with the assurance they were looking for by performing a verification plan. "TestPros was critical to the successful launches of our original Web site and more recently our new service in Canada," says PricewaterhouseCoopers Partner Kimberly O'Connor. "Without the TestPros service professionals and the accurate and comprehensive WebLoad product, we would not have had the same level of confidence at deployment." The partnership identified and corrected load balancing errors prior to going live; errors that would not have been uncovered otherwise. PwC's BetterWeb program launch was a tremendous success with no traffic congestion or delays in response time.
PwC Better Web sm Program Mission When PwC looked at consumer confidence with electronic commerce, it saw an opportunity to take a leadership role in shaping the future by helping businesses increase consumer confidence when making purchases online. "PwC's brand in the marketplace and its rank as the largest public accounting firm among the Big 5, offered us a unique opportunity to lead the industry by providing the PricewaterhouseCoopers BetterWeb Program." says O'Connor. "By developing a better set of standards for disclosing important information to consumers we help on-line businesses build better relationships." PwC built a special Web site dedicated to educating consumers and businesses on the need for industry standards for disclosing policies and practices involving consumer's information over the Web. The site explains what information on-line businesses should disclose and what information consumers should look for before transacting online. It also displays the program's seal which is licensed to a business participating in the program that commits to the program's guidelines for disclosure in the areas of greatest concern to consumers: sales terms, privacy, security and customer complaints. True "Internet-Speed" Testing and Response The PwC BetterWeb Site had to be verified in 24 hours. "We simply didn't have the time to wait days for results." says Bill Kane, Technology Manager for the PWC BetterWeb Program. Recognizing that an outsource service provider could perform the test faster, more effectively and at reduced expense, TestPros was selected to perform an independent verification of the Web site’s performance. WebLoad, the automated testing tool with it's ability to span the application life cycle, was selected for this project because the integration of scalability and integrity testing allows for comprehensive reporting in a shorter timeframe. "Without an independent verification of our software, we would not have had the assurance that we required for this launch," says Kane. PwC's aggressive schedule provided an opportunity to test the upper limits of TestPros "Internet Time" responsiveness. Murray quickly gathered a project team together to work with the PwC development staff. "We got the call about 1:00 PM and we started immediately," said Murray. "By the end of the day we had designed a performance test plan to validate the navigation through the site that a typical customer might perform. We then coordinated a load test with PwC's Internet Service Provider (ISP) to measure the scalability and integrity results." By 8:00 AM the next morning PwC had received it's first WebLoad test result. TestPros performed the verification in the proposed launch environment using RadView’s WebLoad to capture the business processes in JavaScript agendas that were parameterized to emulate the dynamic and varying characteristics. Using WebLoad Multiple IP Support, the scripts were coded with unique IP addresses so that the load balancer would see requests originating from multiple sources. TestPros set out to identify the upper limit on the number of simultaneous users the site could support with the goal of 1000 concurrent users and measure the response time at the various load intervals. Using WebLoad’s in-depth reporting capabilities, the TestPros engineers easily determined the traffic load that the Web site could sustain before customers noticed a reduction in performance, and recommended how to improve the customer’s experience through additional modifications. PwC verified that the site would handle the volume of transactions anticipated. In addition, they received input from TestPros and RadView that helped them incorporate changes in the load distribution software to better facilitate the expected traffic volumes. "TestPros and RadView performed flawlessly and their responsiveness to our demands was more than we expected," says Kane. "We are now engaged with them to provide expanded testing services as we improve and update the site."
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