Fictional Customer: TriMont Mountain Outfitters

TriMont Mountain Outfitters operates the premiere whitewater supply company in the southeastern United States. The company owns a dozen or so retail outlets, but the bulk of their sales comes from catalog orders. In recent years , TriMont expanded their product offerings to include men and women's outdoor clothing, camping supplies , and, oddly enough, a range of gourmet cookware.

TriMont ventured into e-Commerce two years ago with a CGI-based web site. Sadly, this site often experienced outages and unacceptable response times during the peak shopping season . They've decided to move to a Java application server and give their site a fresh look. The IT shop wrote the servlets and JSPs for the web site, and now they're ready to begin their performance testing.

Given their history with the old web site, they want to put the new site through a rigorous performance test before releasing the site to the public. Because the TriMont Mountain web site team lacks strong testing skills, they asked you to act as their performance consultant during the testing. They need help throughout the performance testing life cycle: planning, setting up the environment, and testing. Also, when they find performance issues during the testing, they anticipate requiring your help to resolve them. They've done very little at this point, except buy an introductory copy of a test tool with a 500 virtual user license.