Appvance Redefines QA Productivity

Modern enterprise applications are expected to provide great user experiences. Unfortunately, QA teams lack the time and tools they need to ensure the exceptional performance end users demand. Unlike older tools built for yesterday’s applications and architectures, Appvance PerformanceCloud (APC) is designed for HTML 5 and other modern enterprise applications that run on the desktop, web, mobile devices and in the cloud. APC improves QA productivity by an order of magnitude or better using patent-pending technology that enables teams to test all of their code faster and at greater scale than ever before.

“In the old waterfall days, you might have six weeks to run tests. Now you have three hours,” said Kevin Surace, CEO of Appvance. “To get there, you don’t need a 10 percent productivity improvement you need a 10X or 20X improvement.”

Thought Frameworks, an independent test services and consulting firm, recently verified Surace’s point. It ran five tests comparing APC to HP LoadRunner. In all five tests, PerformanceCloud required 92% less time (or better) to script and run.

APC is a set of tools, a methodology, and a platform for testing modern applications— available in the cloud or behind a firewall— that includes functional and performance testing as well as Application Performance Management (APM). In addition to speeding and simplifying scripting, it accelerates the identification of bottlenecks and functional issues so they can be corrected faster. Unlike other testing products or suites, APC is uniquely capable of testing 100 percent of client-side and server-side code using real browsers to create actual load in the cloud or from a local grid of test machines.

Customers taking advantage of the cloud can run tests locally in their test equipment from PerformanceCloud, Amazon AWS, RackSpace, OpenStack, Azure, Savvis, or a combination of cloud environments. APC also works with existing test solutions and is integrated with popular open source and commercial tools including Jenkins, Hudson, Git, Rally, DynaTrace, and New Relic.

Introducing Third-Generation Testing
Most testing products were designed 10 to 20 years ago. Although they have been updated to accommodate emerging technologies and agile development practices, none were built from the ground up for today’s applications and user experiences.

“The first generation of tools is still the basis for the testing you see today. The second generation was designed for HTML 1.0,” said Surace. “If you’re using first- or second-generation tools on modern applications, you can’t interact with the applications in a way that would help your test team be highly productive.”

With APC, unit tests can be repurposed as functional tests, performance tests, and even security tests. Because test authoring is quick and easy, QA teams can deliver more actionable test results sooner, including a deeper analysis of the results.

Test More Faster, Beginning to End
End-to-end testing has become popular although the concept is incomplete, Surace said. To help QA teams deliver the snappy performance modern applications require, Appvance pioneered “Beginning-to-End” validation.

“End-to-end means you create a test at the browser level and then monitor it at the HTTP interface level. The monitor creates test functions for you that you edit and make work. The test is created at the protocol level, including the load and the automated users, but you’re only testing server-side code,” said Surace. “There’s enough CPU power in the cloud that you shouldn’t be testing 30 percent of your code. You should be able to test all of it.”

APC is uniquely capable of testing 100 percent of user experiences by driving the application through the browser and at the protocol level so the actual transaction times can be predicted with unprecedented accuracy. Test professionals can discover issues in virtually all applications with complex user scenarios by running multiple user profiles and scenarios concurrently in performance and security tests and running Beginning-to-End browser-based application tests concurrently with HTTP, SOAP, REST, ESB, and BPM protocol-level tests. Using the Appvance Designer, which is a Web and Ajax recording environment for functional tests, user profiles can be created and run without code. Alternatively, the exported user profiles or scenarios can be exported to Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby test scripts.

To ensure scalability, APC is capable of testing up to a million users and bringing up a thousand servers on demand from 50 locations around the world. It also provides immediate access to live, drill-down reports that surface the root cause of performance and security bottlenecks or failures, and reveals the reasons why an application does not scale. Since APC is also a methodology (and Appvance provides expert product support) customers can resolve their scalability issues in a Scalable Architecture using integration, BPM, ESB, NoSQL, or Big Data technology.

“Better productivity buys you the ability to build deeper and broader tests,” said Surace. “Instead of two use cases, you may be able to create 20, 30, or 40 in the same amount of time.”

Learn more at www.appvance.com.