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Case Study: A legal test case - SciVisum web tests Law Intranet

Smooth launch of knowledge management portal

In the course of their day-to-day business, international law firms and accountants will build up an extensive bank of knowledge on legislation, financial and general business practices. And it can grow almost daily.

A number of Intranet software products are now available to harvest and share this ever-evolving knowledge, creating an internal information portal for all employees, wherever in the world they are based.

But like everything, before full-scale implementation of a new Intranet system it is prudent to test to see if it can cope with the unexpected.

A top law firm (with hundreds of employees worldwide) recently called in SciVisum prior to the launch of their Knowledge Management system (a proprietary Intranet system). They were particularly keen to see if the system would work efficiently when faced with a large number of simultaneous requests for information. This was important particularly during staff log-in each morning and at times when key information resources were being updated.

SciVisum needed to carry out the testing outside of office hours as existing system modules would be in use during the day and the internal team might be busy configuring the application and populating data sets.

From a range of available test regimes, SciVisum performed in-depth stress testing on the system's functionality. Using their SV-Stress package, they were able to simulate multiple employees accessing the site concurrently, establish the performance levels when a specified number of users are performing a specific task and identify any weaknesses in the overall system.

The system gave a wide spread of response times to user requests under different test conditions. The tests identified at what user-level the system would fail, allowing the law firm to fine-tune the system.

Testing revealed two areas that with enhancements would significantly improve system performance - impossible to identify without putting the system under 'real world' test conditions.

Firstly, testing identified that performance of specific tasks could be optimised considerably to support a greater number of exactly concurrent users. Secondly SV-Stress pinpointed how to improve the way that the Intranet pages were created and delivered. This resulted in the doubling of page delivery time.

Armed with the results of the test, the law firm was able to maximise the portal's performance by upgrading the application hardware and software prior to launch. In particular, they were able to improve configuration settings to reduce delays caused by the application's dependency on other network systems and to work with the software vendor to improve page creation and delivery.
Following the upgrade SciVisum were able to confirm the resultant improvements so that the firm could confidently launch the system.

This case study is based on the results of SciVisum’s SV-Stress service performed on the client’s Intranet.

A comprehensive stress/load testing service, SV-Stress exercises complex functionality by simulating an increasing number of concurrent users performing multiple transactional sequences as they traverse the site. This enables the comparison and contrast of the behaviour of these functional elements with increasing load.

SV-Stress measures the impact of stress on both timing and error rates and following system overload, monitors the subsequent recovery rate.

SciVisum SV-Stress Information