Why Test ITSM Applications for Performance? Webinar

Transcription

1 Why Test ITSM Applications for Performance? Webinar

2 Agenda What is performance testing? Why test ITSM for performance Testing? What are the ITSM modules that need performance testing? What are the use cases to test and how to derive them? Performance testing process and life cycle Tools and issues Question and answer

3 Performance Testing What is Performance Testing? In software engineering, performance testing is performed to determine how a system behaves in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It can also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage. What is Performance Management? The ongoing measurement, monitoring and remediation activities related to the responsiveness of the system.

4 Why test ITSM for Performance testing? BMC ITSM suite are web based Helpdesk applications used by Help desk representatives to Log an incident and resolve that as quickly as possible. So ITSM applications need to demonstrate Stability, Responsiveness and Reliability. Test Necessity Questions to Ask Challenges Different Configuration Upgrade/Migrations Customizations Leveraged Instances Is the ITSM suite configured and implemented as per the documented requirements. Does the configurations affect performance? Do the upgrade, migration have any adverse effects on performance? What customizations were carried in the vanilla ITSM suite of applications? Multiple customers use single ITSM suite of applications with varying degree of customization. Large enterprise, different locations subsidiary, partners, employees, departments, vendors, manufacturers of equipments and foundation data need to be configured properly and performance tested. Any hardware, ITSM application upgrades, AR server upgrades, Architectural changes need tests to re confirm upgrade did not have adverse performance effects. Customizations impact functionality and Performance and thus need testing. Leveraged instances impact Performance and thus need testing.

5 ITSM Suite for Performance Testing The selection of ITSM suite of applications for performance testing should be based on the concept called Daily usage. Hence prefer to include below applications for performance testing. Incident Management Problem Management Service Request Management Change Management The following may not be used heavily by users so we can exclude them from Performance testing or consider them for secondary use cases. Asset Management Service Level Management Knowledge Management

6 ITSM for Performance testing use cases Performance testing should mimic the real production behavior. We should not be testing every feature of ITSM application. Only the Daily used, More frequently used by many end users. Doing production analysis of existing application for their usage pattern helps to come up with good quality use cases. Ask questions like who, when, how, where, which, where to collect data from existing production applications. In general the following should be used as a reference to cover performance test use cases. How many incidents get created? per day, per hour How many searches are done by Help desk representatives? How many view, modifications happen on records? Performance testing is to achieve a specific goal. Say 300 incidents must be created every hour and 500 searches must happen

7 Points to Ponder If you already have ITSM applications hosted on a server. You may be interested to collect below details to help performance testing team. How many MAX users use the applications? What type of users? When the users are usually busy during the day ( 24 hour cycle ) How long users stay in the applications? Which features are mostly used or least used? How many incidents get created, modified, searched during the day? Distinguish between just Logged in User and Active User Not every user who has logged in is actively doing some work.

8 Performance testing life cycle and approach Requirements Elicitation Performance Test Planning Performance Test Design Performance Test Execution Performance Reporting Create approach to collect data from existing system Analyze the data,, Create performance testing use cases. Issue Clarification and knowledge transfer Sign off on Requirements from business team. Collect the business critical processes Determine the required CSF Prepare entry and exit criteria and milestones Prepare the schedules for testing Check Production Environment availability Functional and User data Management Risk and Control strategy Do POC If needed Install Tool and Plugins Determine the test Scripting standards Author, Parameterize scripts, Data Management Review monitoring requirements and metrics to be collated Review the test cases and sign off Version Control of Scripts Create and review the workload scenarios Upload in the tool/repository Setup the required environment and monitors Execute smoke tests Execute Perf Tests. Share the test results with the Project stakeholders Discuss the bottlenecks Regression Test the scenarios in the next execution cycle after the resolutions of the issues Repeat tests Correlate Test results from different test cycles Prepare the test summary document Test Summary presentation to the stake holders along with SLA achieved, deviated Document Lessons Learnt, recommendation Sign Off the test results for production and Pre- Production Compare results of previous with current system. Project Monitoring and Control

9 Tools and Issues BMC Remedy ITSM suite have a proprietary servlet called as Backchannel to communicate between Client and the mid tier. The tools like HP Loadrunner (VUGen) records the backchannel calls in plain string format Silk Performer from the Microfocus or Scapa tool capture the backchannel calls and present them as XML template. XML Templates are easier to parameterize the scripts compared to plain string format. Thus Silk Performer or Scapa are the most preferred tools to use for Performance testing of BMC ITSM suite,

10 Do You Have Any Questions? We would be happy to help.

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