Digital transformation is not an option for a long time ago, and many businesses are doing it. Only entering into the digital world is not sufficient anymore, you also need to build a culture of continuous improvements, that should help you to maintain the leadership position by meeting customer and business demands. On one side you have your business, which is fully automated with high expectations on stability, reliability, and capability of their applications towards achieving their goals. Any downtime or malfunction might lead to huge losses. On another side, you have your smart and digitally aware customers that expect responsive systems, around-the-clock availability, immediate / on-time order fulfillment, quick invoicing, and zero errors. And these are the most common drivers of progress that shouldn’t be disappointed.

How can Performance Testing help you in achieving your strategic goals? 

Performance testing is a powerful tool that applied against a variety of use case scenarios provides valuable insights to identify a company’s digital infrastructure performance risks.  Companies can and must be proactive in the identification of those risks that might damage their reputation, cause revenue and/or opportunity losses, but also in their mitigation, by devoting a certain amount of resources to perform performance testing and act upon the results. 

  

When is the best time to run performance testing? 

 Axapta Masters recommendation is to perform performance testing: 

Before Going Live

Once the solution is stable from a functionality perspective, it’s time to run performance testing to uncover what needs to be improved before they go live. 

Before deploying major changes  

Any change in the system is potentially dangerous with certain risks associated with it and must be approached carefully. Especially when you have major phase releases, performance testing is a mandatory step to verify the existing and new functionalities from the perspective of performance and scalability. 

Periodical verification that system can handle peaks.  

It is common that the load on a productive system is not constant over time, and there are certain events that can trigger business activities to cause meaningful fluctuations in the load. Such events can be caused by business behavior to handle certain tasks at a certain time of a day or month, legal requirements, or some special days such as Christmas, Black Friday… that dictate consumer behavior that directly or indirectly challenges the scalability of business applications. The peak load from such a usage pattern can be significantly higher than the average load. 

  

How can Axapta Masters help you? 

Axapta Masters has years of technical and business expertise working with Microsoft Dynamics solutions across many industries. We are leveraging that experience to help our customers to build an adapted approach based on their business needs. Our approach is unique and is consist of two major directions, that joined together are a guarantee for success: 

• 24/7 production monitoring, and  
• Performance Testing using a non-production environment. 

24/7 production monitoring 

24/7 monitoring over a period of time is a crucial activity that helps us to capture valuable system metrics from a production environment, that are available only at that particular moment, without the possibility to retrieve them afterward. Metrics such as AOS, SQL utilization, head-blockers, slow queries, batch job executions, integration points, exceptions…, are captured mainly in real-time, collected, and organized into a daily or weekly report. 

Performance Testing 

Performance testing itself is a complex process that involves many steps to be successfully performed to get the desired outcome. 

Capture Requirements 

Discuss with business and IT users to understand exact requirements, day-to-day processes, and known issues, to design representative test cases with a focus on specific areas of interest. 

Test Environment 

Usually a non-production environment. 

Identify Test Scenarios 

Work closely with the business and IT users to identify and agree on exact test scenarios taking into consideration multiple factors such as current system load, known issues/challenges, painful areas, and expected growth in the future. 

Plan and design tests 

Create and agree on the schedule, test data, the specific configuration of the environment, and the team that will perform the testing. 

Configure test environment 

Axapta Masters engineers will inspect the environment prior to testing, to assess its health and apply certain configuration changes required to support the testing and capture test results.  

Test execution 

Execute test cases, monitor the executions, environment utilization metrics, and capture the statistics and trace log files. 

If you have more questions or you are interested in a performance review testing, contact us at sales@axaptamasters.com and schedule a meeting!

And if you are interested in potential career opportunities, check out our careers page.