Leading Debt Management Company

Leading debt-management company reduces Pega performance testing from weeks to days

Company overview

The UK’s leading debt-management organization was unable to identify and resolve a memory leak problem that was degrading performance within its cloud-hosted Pega application. They had an immediate need to address these mission-critical issues, since Pega is their “backbone” platform. But longer term, the organization was looking for a better performance testing framework to ensure that the Pega application scales to meet the expected surge in traffic.

As the organization migrated to the cloud-based Pega platform, its existing open-source performance testing tool became a hurdle when validating the complex 200+ transaction business flow within the faster build pipeline. Running performance tests was time-consuming and not scalable; the tool was reporting inaccurate response times, required a lot of manual script maintenance, and was limited in its ability to integrate into automated CI/CD pipelines.

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    Industry: Financial Services
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    Location: UK
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Challenges

  • Pinpointing a critical performance issue that the previous tool could not identify
  • Creating performance tests was highly time-consuming, requiring a lot of manual coding effort to customize scripts
  • Correlating and debugging complex scripts comprising 170‒200 transactions
  • Updating scripts required rescripting the entire flow whenever application code changed
  • Test scripts would fail even without any change to the environment
  • Need developer-friendly tools that support CI/CD pipelines
  • Need enhanced reporting capabilities for more accurate insight into Pega application performance issues
  • Significant increase in Pega traffic expected

Solution

They turned to Cognizant (a Tricentis partner), who recommended using Tricentis NeoLoad to:

  • Create new scripts for all the existing business flows
  • Run a load test to reproduce the issue in a non-production environment
  • Work with application and cloud experts to test-triage-retest until the problem was diagnosed
  • Perform scalability tests to monitor and analyze resource utilization across the cloud and data center

 

Cognizant recommended Tricentis NeoLoad because it makes designing and maintaining complex test scripts for enterprise-grade apps like Pega very easy. NeoLoad doesn’t require coding expertise or specialized know-how, and updating scripts is mostly automatic.

The organization says that with NeoLoad, it has been able to save two days of script creation time. Since each release utilizes five scripts, scripting effort has been reduced from over 17 days down to about a week — translating into savings of $3,000 per month.

This makes it ideal for the test-triage-retest scenario where teams who are not first and foremost performance testing experts are involved. With NeoLoad’s auto-correlation frameworks, other automation and collaboration features, and superior test reporting capabilities, the organization is now able to accelerate test cycles and release into production faster with greater confidence.

  • Arrow IconPinpointed mission-critical performance issue that previous tool could not identify
  • Arrow IconReduced complex script design/update time by 60% — from 3.5 to 1.5 days
  • Arrow IconSaved $3,000 per monthly release
  • Arrow IconReduced manual correlation of 200-transaction scripts

Resources

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