A Saudi Arabian Bank

Challenge

— Perform stress-testing as a part of compliance with regulatory requirements.

—  Provide comprehensive reports covering the methodology, scope of stress-testing, conclusions and recommendations to balance out the productivity of the applications with TCO.

Solution

First, GDC Services team investigated the application architecture and underlying infrastructure to propose with the most effective way of stress testing, covering all the critical functionalities of the applications, stress testing tools covering Oracle Enterprise Business Suit applications as well.

After the first step, the experts produced exact scoping of the functions of the applications to be tested considering the criticality of the applications for several categories of users. Meanwhile we also consulted the customer on creating a standalone copy of the production environment ensuring that the replica environment is 100% identical to the production so that the stress testing results are as close to reality as it possibly can get.

Next, we calculated and implemented the workload of “client machines” to simulate the user’s activities to ensure stress testing with current average number of simultaneous connections and future growth of the business resulting in increased number of the applications users.

Thus, the team executed a comprehensive workload test replicating multiple simultaneous users of the applications, adjusting stress test tools in the process to replicate different types of users’ behavior and to cover the full scope of functions to be tested, which involved web-interfaces, thin clients, etc.

As a final step, GDC Services provided the customer with comprehensive reports covering each application separately and describing:

—  the methodology of stress-testing,

—  tools and settings used,

—  rationale behind the chosen approach to stress testing,

—  executive summary covering the current performance,

—  performance considering potential growth of the customer’s business,

—  recommendations for balancing out the performance capacity,

—  risks management and Total Cost of Ownership of the applications,

Also, we provided detailed report for each test run with conclusions by our experienced experts.

We presented the report and executive summary to the customer as an input for
convenient decision making and application development strategy.

Results

— Based on our vast experience, we compiled detailed but easy to go through reports - for the applications capacity, bottlenecks and overheads in the architecture, and infrastructure of the applications.

—  Customer is fully compliant with the regulatory requirements.

—  Recommended the measures to balance out bottlenecks and overheads to decrease the overall TCO of the applications while ensuring that the applications are capable to support the aggressive growth strategy of the customer.

— Detected additional potential issues with the applications
and proposed ways to fix and increase stability of the applications.