Digital River revolutionized its enterprise testing strategy by implementing agile load testing through WebLOAD, marking a transformative shift in how the company validates performance for global giants like Microsoft and Samsung.
As a Commerce-as-a-Service leader processing millions of transactions daily, Digital River’s migration from LoadRunner to WebLOAD established a new benchmark in agile performance testing, enabling real-time validation across their virtualized infrastructure and cloud-based commerce platform.
With global clients like the Samsung, Kaspersky labs, AVG, Avast, Sennheiser and Microsoft relying on its SaaS e-commerce platform means that Digital River cannot afford any performance glitches. Digital River holds three development centers, in the US and Ireland. With an entirely virtualized environment, load testing is mixed in with production servers, establishing a miniature version of the production setup with some of the interfaces mocked out.
Apart from the primary goal of performance validation, Chad Martin, Sr. Technical Manager at Digital River, wanted to establish an agile environment where his team could deliver performance information back to the developers in as tight a loop as possible.
The load testing group was using LoadRunner but was frustrated with the high costs and lack of customer support. After conducting an analysis of available load testing solutions, the team settled on WebLOAD.
“My guys tried WebLOAD and were very impressed. After seeing a live demo, we decided that this is the direction we wanted to take, including scaling up WebLOAD to production integration with AWS” says Martin.
WebLOAD currently answers all of Digital River’s load testing needs. The flexibility of WebLOAD allows the team to test a wide variety of scenarios – from how many orders can be run through a shopping carts on a site, to more specific scenarios like a new inventory service, the transactions that can be run simultaneously and how quickly it responds.
“It runs the gamut…everything,” says Martin. “We can be very high level – extracting logs from production and basically pulling out all the URLs that got hit in a day and pounding them with WebLOAD.”
The customer support change cannot be overestimated. “It’s a night and day from LoadRunner support. The WebLOAD team is great at responding to questions and dig in to help us regardless of the complexity of the problem. The support we’re getting from RadView has really exceeded our expectations.”
Using WebLOAD, the Digital River team has set up an agile process of load testing. The test team can pull a nightly build and create an automated performance benchmark. Once data is generated it is sent to developers immediately so they see it the following morning.
“Software architects are working closely with my team to make quick changes based on our load testing reports,” says Martin. Another noticeable result was around Thanksgiving ecommerce sales. “We had a record breaking holiday season. We prepared all year, examining the performance of our SaaS platform and conducted a focused effort on iterative load testing together with the development group to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the system. When Thanksgiving came, it was happily boring – event with a site as large as the Microsoft store!!”
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