Rational Suite

Are We Really Ready to Realese?

Performance Studio

"Rational has closely examined the development and testing process and identified the crucial needs of both individuals and project teams. The company has packaged the right tools to meet these needs rather than randomly packaging what may have been readily available. The result is a product suite that accomplishes its goal to 'unify, optimize and simplify' the efforts of project teams."
International Data Corporation, March 1999
The e-business Solution You Need
Performance testing e-business applications is a difficult and sometimes terrifying job. In e-business, the pace is fast, the stakes are high, and software failures are public events. Updates and new releases are expected not in years or months, they are expected in Internet time — weeks and days. Software failures, undetected because of insufficient testing, mean more Than a little lost time. Failures mean lost customers and lost opportunity. And system crashes, caused by applications that do not scale and cannot handle the required load, send customers to the competition and stock prices plummeting. The headlines derailing prolonged outages for online brokers and other e-business are as embarrassing and costly as they arc well known. The terrifying part is that in the vast majority of these e-disasters, competent testers gave the go ahead to applications that failed. Will your company be in the headlines next? Are you confident your e-business application is scalable? Do you know how it will perform under heavy loads?

More than ever before, the success of your entire business depends on accurate, effective and easy-to-use performance testing. Most. organizations know this, yet unexpected failures happen every day. What makes effective load testing so difficult? For one thing, performance testing typically begins at the end of the software development cycle, where time is short. Slack in the schedule, if there ever was any, has been eaten away long ago. Finding a serious problem late in the cycle is likely to cause the release date to be delayed, or the project to be canceled altogether—unwelcome options in a time when everyone from end users to wall street analysts are expecting new software releases faster and faster. On top of that, the tools a tester uses may be difficult to scale, require tedious programming, or provide too little information to diagnose or reproduce problems. Or perhaps the tools are a resting hodgepodge, barely integrated with each other or the tools used by other team members — managers, analysts and developers. Everyone wants to know, "Are we really ready to release?" — and you, the performance tester, are expected to give them the final answer, quickly and correctly.

The Only End-To-End Testing Solution
How exactly does Rational Suite PerformanceStudio help? Rational Suite PerformanceStudio unifies the entire software development team — analysts, developers and testers by giving everyone the same answer to the question, "Are we really ready to release?". And, while Rational Suite PerfurmanceStudio is optimized specifically for the role of load tester, it is the industry's only end-to-end testing solution for the entire software development life cycle. With Rational Suite PerformanceStudio testers are no longer an isolated group working in the high-pressure days before a looming deadline. By improving team communication, testing early and iteratively throughout development, and using a single set of tools, methods, data and metrics, Rational Suite PerformanceStudio integrates the tester with the rest of the development team. The benefits extend beyond the test department to the entire organization: lower costs, less risk, and the ability to deliver high-quality, scalable, reliable e-business applications in less time. Rational Suite PerformanceStudio is a complete solution, not just for e-business, but for ERP and client server environments as well.

Rational Suite PerformanceStudio improves team communication by linking all the team's test assets (requirements, plans, procedures, tests and results) in a single repository, with a single tracking system and a common user interface. For Testers and developers, this means that defects are easily located and reproduced, eliminating frustrating communication problems between team members. Moreover, with Rational Suite PerformanceStudio, testers can provide analysts with the crucial performance data they need to make key architectural design decisions when they need it - early in the project life cycle. And with a few mouse clicks, anyone on the team can get detailed report on requirements coverage, code coverage, defects, even specific team assignments and responsibilities.

With Rational Suite PerformanceStudio you can find more defects earlier, track them better, retest subsequent builds, and measure progress more accurately than ever before. Integrated instrumentation lets you combine regression testing with code coverage or profiling, and automated reliability testing lets you focus on the more challenging functional and load testing problems.

SmartTest Your Web in Internet Time
The success of your e-business depends on a complete, precise evaluation of your entire e-business application before deployment. You must test the functional requirements of your application as it operates under a production load, and you must measure system response times to verify performance requirements. Your tools have to be able to easily create scalable scripts using variable input data and provide you with accurate, detailed results. Rational Suite PerformanceStudio delivers unparalleled power to ensure that your application meets both the functional and performance requirements established for it with four unique and innovative technologies: WebSmart Recording, DataSmart Recording, LoadSmart Scheduling, and Transaction Smart Analysis.

WebSmart Recording
Instead of blindly recording static URLs in test scripts, the Rational Robot component of Rational Suite PerformanceStudio uses WebSmart Recording to record robust scripts that recognize and Lest objects in HTML, DHTML, and the WWW Consortium's Document Object Model (as well as Visual Basic, Visual C/C++, Java, ActiveX, PowerBuilder, and more). With the click of a check box you can run other tools as you execute Rational Robot's efficient and highly reusable functional tests. For example, as part of your regression tests, you can also pinpoint application bottlenecks with Rational's application profiler, test for reliability issues, such as memory-leaks and run-time errors, and obtain detailed code-coverage information to identify untested code, Rational Robot creates effective, accurate test scripts in two ways:

DataSmart Recording
By having both GUI and Virtual User testing within one test tool, you can easily scale a load on the back end server while simultaneously, and from the same schedule, executing functionality tests against your client. In addition, you can determine response time degradation at two levels—client response times as seen at the client connection level, and the end user experience as seen at the GUI.

Rational Suite PcrformanceStudio's DataSmart Recording automatically identifies literal data from your recorded sessions that are considered "datapool" candidates. These candidates represent user input that may need to be varied when you use a single recorded user session and generate a load of 100s or 1000s of Virtual Users. From this datapool, testers graphically select data fields for Rational Suite PerformanceStudio to vary in multiuser Tests.

LoadSmart Scheduling
Performance tests are only as valid as their underlying workload assumptions. In a typical production environment, different user groups put different loads on the target system. For example, an order entry group may tax the system's data Insert capability, while a report generation group exercises data reads. With l.oadSmart Scheduling you can easily build complex usage scenarios, without programming, to emulate user group activities and create workload schedules. By weighting the various user groups in your schedule, you can quickly produce very accurate system loads. For example, you can specify that 20% of users belong to the Query group, 30% to the Entry group, and 50% to the Report group. Once you have created your graphical workload, you can easily scale your load test from a handful of users to tens of thousands, each performing various tasks, without having to create a new schedule for each user count.

With Rational Suite PerformanceStudio's graphical scheduling tool, LoadSmart Scheduling, scaling load tests from 10 to tens of thousands of users, is as easy as turning up a dial control.

TransactionSmart Analysis
How well are your business transactions being performed? Which operations are taking the most time? What can you do to improve the performance of your system? Rational Suite PerformanceStudio's TransactionSmart Analysis gives you the information you need to answer these questions with three levels of diagnostic information to isolate the cause of your performance bottleneck (see illustration below).

With this data, you can analyze the business transaction, low level client calls, and system resources that are under stress. Only Rational Suite PerformanceStudio's TransactionSmart Analysis provides you this level of comprehensive, detailed data to tune your application, ensuring the best possible response times for your customers.

Architect for Performance
Many development projects follow a fairly standard, linear process: gather requirements, develop an architecture with a visual model, implement client and server components, and finally test the performance of the system, Because performance testing waits until development is complete, a great deal of risk is carried throughout the project. If load testing uncovers serious performance problems in the architecture, it is often too late in the project life cycle to make the necessary changes and keep the project on schedule. But what if you could performance test your server configuration sooner? Your analysts would have access to the information they need to make architectural changes while there is still time to implement them. Risk would be reduced earlier, and there would be fewer surprises and less anxiety in performance tests late in the project, Rational Suite PerformanceStudio delivers this unprecedented capability through a component called Rational PerformanceArchitect. With PerformanceArchitect, you can test performance early in the project life cycle — before developing your client software. Rational PerformanceArchitect generates virtual user test scripts directly from information in your visual model, allowing you to test multiple architecture designs before spending time and money implementing the client applications. With performance tests results already in hand, analysts can evaluate the performance impact of various design alternatives, such as the implementation of a thick or a thin client Your analysts can Architect for Performance, quickly and confidently determining the optimal architecture for your e-business application.

This innovative solution lets you stress test your system architecture very early in the software development process. Now you can identify performance problems with your architectural design before you ever code your client.

Why Not Make Your Job Easier?
In today's frenetic, high-stakes software development environment, effective performance testing is a core competence. You must be able to do it, and do it well - with Rational Suite PerformanceStudio, you can. Analysts, developers and testers have a powerful advantage with award-winning tools at every phase of development, unique capabilities like WebSmart recording, DataSmart Recording, LoadSmart Scheduling, TransactionSmart Analysis, and the ability to Architect for Performance. Rational Suite PerformanceStudio unifies your entire software development team with a complete, end-to-end solution to ensure that your e-business application will be ready to release—on schedule.

Use Rational Suite PerformanceStudio and keep your e-business out of the failure headlines.

All of the products in the Rational Suite family share a common foundation of team-unifying tools, and include additional role-specific tools to optimize each suite for the individual analysts, developers and testers on your team.

For the tester, Rational Suite PerformanceStudio provides:

For the team, Rational Suite PerformanceStudio includes the Rational Team Unifying Platform: Rational Suite & Rational ClearCase — A Winning Combination
In order to answer the question "Are we really ready to release?" accurately and confidently you need a complete set of tools and world-class support. Rational Software makes this possible. With Rational Suite and Rational ClearCase, our market-leading configuration and change management solution, any team member can accurately assess progress and quality at any time - even across multiple platforms, operating systems and geographically distributed sites. And all Rational tools are supported by an extensive worldwide service and support organization which offers role-based education and excellent technical support services.

Also from Rational Software

* Available for Windows and UNIX

SPECIFICATIONS

NT Master Station

NT Agent UNIX Agent Additional ports on request

ADDITIONAL FEATURES

Where Can Rational Suite Be Bought in Russia?

Rational Suite can be bought in Interface Ltd., Russian Partner of Rational Software. The product is also available in Online Software Shop

Where Can I Get Additional Information On Any Rational Software Product?

Дополнительная информация

За дополнительной информацией обращайтесь в Interface Ltd.


Interface Ltd.

Tel: 7+(095) 135-55-00, 135-25-19
E-mail: mail@interface.ru
http://www.interface.ru
Подготовили: s-novikov@interface.ru
tkachev@interface.ru

Дата: 02.02.2000