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QACenter Delivers High-performing Apps at Time Warner

Keeping over 80,000 employees informed about company issues can be a challenge. Time Warner relies on Compuware QACenter Performance Edition to make certain its self-service portal, employeeConnection, stands up to the task.

When Rob Caruso joined Time Warner as a senior business systems analyst, one of his first responsibilities was to take part in an evaluation of load and regression testing tools for web and client/server applications. The company doesn't have a staff dedicated to application Quality Assurance, so the goal was to find a tool that would allow developers to test applications easily and routinely before placing them into production.

"At the time I came into the picture, we had not selected a vendor, but were choosing basically between two," Caruso says. "Neither one really stuck out from the other." Then, Time Warner got a look at QACenter Performance Edition. "When Compuware came in and showed us what QACenter did, it pretty much just sealed the deal right there," he relates.

QACenter Performance Edition is a highly scalable performance testing and server monitoring solution for web-based, ERP/CRM and distributed client/server applications. It records and plays back thousands of virtual user transactions to quickly create accurate production simulations and easily measure application performance and scalability so developers and testers can deploy applications with confidence.

What impressed Time Warner most about QACenter, Caruso says, "was how easy it was to use, the support Compuware offers and the solution's affordability." Ease of use was the deal clincher. Without a dedicated QA staff to run the tools, it was important that every developer in some way, shape or form could leverage the solution to his or her own abilities. "All of the developers and technology people in the room were happy that they could take the CDs back to their work stations, install them and get to work," Caruso remembers.

Putting the Testing Solution to the Test

With QACenter we have clearly realized better performance out of our systems.   — Rob Caruso, Senior Business Systems Analyst, Time Warner

Caruso is primarily responsible for employeeConnection, a web-based application and employee self-service portal. It evolved from an application that provided employees access to their benefits, called Benefits Online--a feature that is still part of the portal. From there, additional applications were added, including the company's stock option plan and other HR-related material. "We decided to wrap them all into one portal with a single sign on and make it available to the entire enterprise," says Caruso.

That application is custom built from the ground up. It is based on Cold Fusion middleware, according to Caruso, with some Active Server Pages and recently incorporated .NET applications. "Because employeeConnection is written from scratch," says Caruso, "we're very focused on performance issues. If it were a package-based solution, we'd have some idea of the number of users it could support. With QACenter we now have the ability to accurately predict performance under various usage situations."

Making Benefits Online Stand Up to the Load

"Originally," Caruso continues, "we expected to handle 600 to 700 concurrent users. But when we began our volume testing, we discovered that at somewhere around 70 concurrent users, the application became exceedingly slow. Until we used QACenter Performance Edition we didn't have a clue why this was happening."

Caruso is still amazed at how quickly QACenter helped his team discover and correct the problem. "Within 3 days of using QACenter Performance Edition, we were able to identify and resolve the problem so that the system was handling 1000 concurrent users--considerably more than we expected." Because of issues QACenter helped identify, the team did more tweaking, adding two more servers, and was able to increase performance considerably more. "Right now, at 1,000 concurrent users, we notice no performance impact whatsoever."

A Tool to Believe In

To say that Caruso is satisfied with Time Warner's decision to purchase QACenter Performance Center would be an understatement. "It's much easier to use than competing products and, quite frankly, we realized a tremendous performance increase after using the product," he says. "Going forward, it's also given us insight on how to develop our applications better and how to monitor and troubleshoot them more effectively. We use QACenter for testing purposes, but it's also become a tremendous aid in finding out where things are breaking down."

Caruso is quick to add he wouldn't hesitate to recommend QACenter Performance Edition to others. "Believe me, some of the people we talked to sold load testing and regression tools and that was it. It's amazing to me that Compuware is a huge company offering a lot of diverse products and, yet still in my eyes, has a much better load and regression testing solution than companies who specialize in that arena."

"I know that, on the whole, all the way down from my top management to me, everyone has been extremely satisfied with what we put into the product and what we've gotten out of it. With QACenter, we've clearly realized better performance out of our systems." Now that's high praise indeed.

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