Moolya Performance Testing – An unturned stone then, a shining gem today!
We have been offering software testing services for about 4 years to the world, providing services right from functionality, user experience, check automation and business to security testing, but there was still a stone left to turn upside down and that was performance testing.
Initially, we didn’t offer the utmost critical service in testing. It was quite obvious then, we must add performance testing to our list of test solutions and this post is about the journey of how we started performance testing in our own brainual way.
Here’s how we started..
We had a number of clients around the world for whom we were testing everything from functionality to business(Except performance). While performing functionality testing for our clients, we often faced the issue of servers crashing and slow response times. We had to ask the clients to have performance testing done for the application under test so that we could test smoothly. It was frustrating for us to rely on someone else for the sort of stability we needed to perform great testing.
That’s when we decided to take on this challenge and to offer performance testing to our clients to ensure we help them deliver great applications and software.
What we did then..
For us then, it was vital to explore and understand the basics of performance, figure out the feasible tools, the way it is carried out in the market and the way Moolya can do better, we, of course, were aiming for the best!
- We started interacting with well-known names in the performance testing field.
- We started reading books on performance testing, ‘Performance Testing For Dummies’ was our first one (Yes, we were once dummies when it came to performance testing. Try convincing one of our customers about that!)
- We held discussions on various forums like LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media about the problems posed by performance issues
- We set up servers on our local machines, hosted applications on these servers and explored the web server architecture
- We then started exploring and practising Jmeter, an open-source performance testing tool on our locally hosted applications
We got our first break..
While still in learning mode we got our first break, our first performance testing project! This felt good.
The application was a job portal; an Indian venture that was going to the market. The stakeholders had a requirement around the response time and breaking point for the application under a given load.
Honestly, this wasn’t easy for us or our nerves! Until now we were practicing load testing on locally hosted applications. But the application we were now presented with to test was a real production site with lots of complexities, it was the real deal.
Though we faced several challenges during the execution phase, we managed to overcome all of them by discussing these challenges on forums with the experts.
This was just the beginning, since then we never looked back and to support the statement we have worked on projects ranging from job portals, e-learning, e-commerce, standalone applications, ERP, event messaging systems, media and oh yeah, we have even helped The Indian Government for one of their critical projects.
The one project that made us proud!
We would like to talk more about this government project we had the pleasure to participate in. It was October 1st when we got a call from Delhi right from NIC (National Informatics Centre) enquiring about load testing for a web application that was supposed to go live next day October 2nd.
It was a web application for the Swatchh Bharat (Clean India Movement) campaign that our honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched on October 2nd. PM Modi and his team wanted to make sure that site does not crash in case of heavy traffic once it’s live.
They required someone who could give them confidence that the site won’t crash under heavy load and complete the task efficiently within the given time. (Yes, they were indeed looking for us)
Honestly, we were very excited and proud to have been asked to take up this assignment. We flew that morning to Delhi, set up our test environment within an hour; while exploring and identifying the performance critical scenarios of the application.
Most of the scenarios were quite simple to perform but as is with all projects, there were two scenarios which were complex and we really had to put our thinking caps on and discuss with the dev team to find out proper solutions.
That was a day we worked from noon till midnight to get the load testing done for the Swatch Bharat website, we are happy. The testing done by us resulted in them changing from database, load balancer to web servers.
Reminiscing the day we worked for the government, we take tremendous pride in traversing this incredible journey of having no performance testing service to the services which has even served The Government of India for one of its critical projects.
This was our proud contribution to the Clean India Movement.
Performance testing experts who contributed to this project – Satyam Dixit and Kushal Kumar
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