Brochure. Application Development, Test & Delivery. Seven Ways to Fail. Avoid the business risks of inadequately testing your applications.

Transcription

1 Application Development, Test & Delivery Avoid the business risks of inadequately testing your applications.

2 Network conditions affect the performance of applications in many ways. Research suggests that 70% of mobile transaction response time is spent on the network. This reality intensifies the need for comprehensive testing of software before applications go into production. Unfortunately, some common approaches to performance testing suffer from critical weaknesses that leave your business at risk. Network Conditions Make or Break Application Performance In today s digitally driven economy, enterprises rely increasingly on software to improve revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, and brand perception. This reality of business in the age of Mobile, Cloud, Agile and Big Data creates the need for comprehensive testing of applications before they go into production. At its core, application testing in the New Style of IT requires the same basic tenets of traditional application testing, along with some new best practices: Test environments must accurately reflect real-world conditions. Testing must be done under precisely repeatable conditions. Testing must include what if and edge scenarios. Testing must account for performance impacts on both users and infrastructure. While the goal is clear, the reality is something else. In their approaches to testing the performance of applications, many organizations fall far short of best practices. And that s a problem. Inadequate testing can lead to poor application performance and all the consequences that come with it including lost revenue, lost customers, and frustrated employees. Seven Paths to Unknown Performance Table 1 highlights the weaknesses of seven approaches to mobile application testing. These approaches can be roughly divided into two camps: inadequate and dangerous. Inadequate Approaches Basic appliances Simulation/modeling methods Remote load generators Freeware products Are limited to only emulation Fail to test many of the critical network variables Have issues with accuracy Require a high amount of effort to map and implement Result in only calculated estimates, not actual results Are expensive to implement and operate Are limited to off hours, which is not reflective of a production environment Can t control network variability, resulting in an inaccurate, nonrepeatable, expensive environment Lack discovery capabilities, analytics, optimization recommendations, and more Offer limited emulation-only capability Yield inaccurate results that are not repeatable in a controlled test environment Lack support Lack discovery capabilities, analytics, optimization recommendations, and more Dangerous Approaches War driving In the wild Do-it-yourself Produces non-repeatable and inaccurate results Is an expensive method Puts teams in harm s way for limited value Is costly with limited value Cannot repeat test with any level of accuracy Puts the business at risk of major performance issues that could take down production Creates business risk if the beta test team finds defects and shares publicly Uses odd approaches like riding elevators and wrapping devices in aluminum foil for mobile app testing, and unplugging desktops and laptops from networks for web and two-tier applications Provides limited results with no control and no ability to accurately create production environments Table 1. Inadequate and dangerous approaches to application testing 2

3 One Path to Proven Performance Micro Focus Network Virtualization provides an accurate way to recreate production network conditions in a pre-production lab. This suite of products provides support for capturing and emulating network impairments, such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. In addition, Network Virtualization enables emulation of multiple locations and user groups in the test lab. This capability is essential for accurately recreating production-level environments with all types of users. The first step required to implement network virtualization is to discover the real-world network conditions affecting end users and application services. Micro Focus Network Capture unobtrusively captures production network constraints like bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. Recorded interval statistics can then be replayed, or virtualized, in the test environment, using Network Virtualization. Network conditions affecting app performance must be tested. Forrester 1 In addition to capturing real-world network conditions, Network Virtualization solutions include the Network Virtualization Library of mobile and broadband network conditions. This library, built on millions of data points, provides typical, best, and worst-case conditions recorded from tens of thousands of major cities around the world, and all major carriers. With Network Virtualization technologies, you can apply custom impairments to determine the specific effect on application and network behavior in order to emulate worst-case scenarios or to troubleshoot specific in-production problems. The Micro Focus technology also provides the ability to execute tests, analyze results, and remediate or optimize performance. With these automated code-level optimization recommendations your applications will perform at least 40% faster. Network Virtualization is the only network virtualization solution that covers all of the critical test elements and best practices with: Discovery and capture Virtualization and test Analysis and optimization 1 Forrester Research. A Benchmark to Drive Mobile Test Quality, February 20, One Path to Success and Seven Paths to Failure One Path to Success Critical Test Elements Network Virtualization Basic appliances Simulation (modeling) Remote load generators Freeware War driving In the wild Do it yourself Discovery Network discovery: point-in-time Network discovery: historic Global library of network conditions Network performance evaluation Network virtualization Network constraints Model Network model replay Visual network design/modeler Model Controllable and repeatable testing Model Limited Peak/edge conditions testing Performance validation Basic Continued on the next page 3

4 Critical Test Elements Analysis and optimize Automated optimization recommendations One Path to Success Network Basic Simulation Virtualization appliances (modeling) Root-cause diagnosis Remote load generators Freeware War driving In the wild Do it yourself Transaction SLO evaluation Limited Location-aware performance monitoring Limited Operational Hardware-based solution Software-based solution Deployed internally (no firewall changes) Table 2. Capabilities of eight approaches to application testing Get on the Path to Proven Performance If you are not fully testing your applications by recreating production network conditions in a lab setting prior to production, you are gambling with your business. To protect your revenue and your customer base, you need to fully test and validate your applications before they go live. For these efforts, there are seven paths to failure and just one with proven, enterprise results, so choose wisely. That s Network Virtualization. Learn More At /networkvirt 4

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