Testing of a Personnel Planning Application

Testing of a Personnel Planning Application

Industry
Education, Nonprofit

Summary

A childcare organization in the Netherlands was implementing a centralized personnel-planning system covering work-time scheduling and planning, vacation planning, medical-certificate registration, and more. The system had to complete reports for a certain number of registered users within a limited timeframe — staying reliable under overload from more concurrent users than expected, and resilient in stress situations when hardware resources couldn't process operations correctly. INNERLUXES investigated and optimized its performance.

About the Customer

The Customer is a childcare organization in the Netherlands.

The Challenge

A personnel-planning system was under implementation as a centralized solution covering scheduling and planning of work time, vacation planning, medical-certificate registration, and similar activities. One requirement was to complete reports for a certain number of registered users within a limited timeframe. The system therefore had to be reliable enough to resist overloads when concurrent users exceeded expectations, and resistant to stress situations when hardware resources were unable to process operations correctly.

The Solution

INNERLUXES assigned a team of performance engineers to investigate the application's current performance and reliability. At the initial stage, they analyzed possible bottlenecks using developed load-test scenarios and running measurements.

The measurements revealed system bottlenecks such as excessive CPU usage on the application server, a significant time lag between gathering and processing data from the database and sending the response to the client side, and memory leaks in the ASP.NET code. After several profiling sessions, the team obtained the information needed to eliminate the bottlenecks and passed it to the development team.

The Results

  • Based on the testing team's feedback, the development team significantly improved and optimized the business logic of data processing at the application-server tier and eliminated the memory leaks.
  • The changes improved the overall performance of the application.
  • Subsequent performance measurements and uptime tests showed the system became 10 times faster.

Technologies and Tools

MS WCF, XBAP, MS SQL Server, JetBrains .NET Profiler, HP/Mercury LoadRunner.

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