Performance Testing with the Web Application Center Test

All this talk about scalability is good in theory, and it's not hard to find hardware and software that produce impressive benchmarks. Theories and benchmarks don't guarantee adequate performance of your portal. You have to prove it yourself by either putting the system into production and hoping for the best or testing. For most of us, life is too short not to perform performance testing.

You can test the performance of your portal by standing it up in a test environment and unleashing a large number of users, or simulated users, to monitor how it responds to a load. You need dozens or hundreds of human users to get your portal to break a sweat. This type of testing is expensive and difficult to coordinate. On the other hand, you should tap into testing by human beings if possible, as you may uncover not only performance problems but usability or even training problems. Sooner or later, you need to allow humans to use the system, and getting bad news sooner is usually preferable.

For serious performance testing, however, automated testing tools can take you much higher than you can go with human testers alone. Coordination of automated testing is much simpler, and you do not have to worry about testers being pulled away from their mission by phone calls or carpools. You can perform automated testing any time of day or night, and you can strictly control the behavior of the test by means of a test script.

You can choose from a large number of testing products on the market. Here we focus on a single one to illustrate scalability testing: Microsoft Application Center Test (ACT). One reason is that it comes from Microsoft, and the second powerful reason is the price. The product is a free download from www.microsoft.com/applicationcenter/. You can view information on the tool at this site and read the documentation on MSDN. The link for the documentation is at msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/act/htm/actml_main.asp.

ACT is designed for Visual Studio .NET. It lets you record a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser session as the basis for testing or code the script from scratch. Test scripts are written in VBScript or JavaScript. The tool stores data generated during the test for subsequent analysis.