Example 2: An Employee Time-Off Request Web Application

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services > 13. Piloting Your Directory Service > Pre-pilot Testing

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Pre-pilot Testing

Before you go through the trouble of setting up a pilot involving users, there are some aspects of your service that you should test in a lab environment. Testing is different from piloting. Testing is done in a closed environment, usually just by you and your staff; piloting is more open , users are involved, and the scope is expanded. For example, you should do preliminary scale, performance, and functionality testing to select the software to run your pilot on. These tests are best performed in a laboratory environment, where mistakes are easily corrected and configurations are easily changed.

In Chapter 12, "Choosing Directory Products," we talked about the steps to follow when selecting software for your directory, including performing tests in a laboratory environment. However, laboratory testing should be used for more than just selecting software. In the laboratory, you can find out whether the system works for you. Perhaps you can even persuade a few of your colleagues to see whether it works for them. Such testing is a crucial step before piloting or deploying any significant change to your service. Although this doesn't necessarily mean the change will work for your users in the environment outside the lab, testing gives you some confidence that it will.

Laboratory testing is aimed at answering objective questions about the system being tested . Does it do what it's supposed to do? Does it perform within acceptable limits? Can it scale to the required size ? Naturally, to answer these questions effectively, you need to have appropriate goals in mind for the features you are testing.

Make a list of objective, measurable goals for your system, similar to the one shown in Table 13.1. In this example, the component being tested is a new directory server. The objective questions to be determined are whether the new server scales and gives acceptable performance while holding a certain number of entries, serving a predefined number of client connections, and performing a predefined set of queries. The entries, connections, and queries are chosen to reflect the expected typical load the server will experience in production.

Table  13.1. Examples of objective criteria to measure in a laboratory testing environment
Description Goal Comments
Number of directory entries 200,000 150,000 people entries, 30,000 group entries, 10,000 organizational unit entries, 10,000 miscellaneous entries.
Number of simultaneous connections 500 Some of these connections may be idle.
Number of simultaneousactive connections 50 These connections are allperforming the operationslisted below.
Response time Average of 1 second. Noclient should experience longer than a 2-second delay. Response time is for clients performing simple equality searches on a single indexed attribute.

Laboratory testing cannot answer subjective questions about the system being tested. Questions such as "Will users like the system?" can be answered only by asking users during a pilot. Other questions that seem to be objective at first glance also cannot be answered without piloting in a real environment. For example, the interaction between your service and other services on the network, your network topology, various hard-to-predict failure modes, and real user behavior are difficult to produce in a laboratory environment. Piloting helps produce the appropriate conditions to answer these questions.

You should enter the piloting stage only after you have answered some basic questions by testing in the laboratory. Having done so, you can be confident that your pilot will succeed.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services,  2002 New Riders Publishing
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Index terms contained in this section

directories
         piloting service
                    pre-pilot testing 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th
laboratory testing
          pre-pilot 2nd
                    objectives 2nd
                    subjective questions
objectives
          laboratory pre-pilot testing 2nd
piloting
         directory services
                    pre-pilot testing 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th
pre-pilot service testing
          laboratory 2nd
                    objectives 2nd
                    subjective questions
services
         piloting
                    pre-pilot testing 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th
subjective questions
          laboratory pre-pilot testing
testing
          pre-pilot
                    laboratory 2nd 3rd 4th 5th

2002, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services
Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672323168
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 245

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