De-risking performance and load testing for the Public Sector

By Peter Greenwood, Managing Director, Facilita
 
With IT now accounting for some 16 per cent of Central Government spending, there’s an increased pressure on both central and local government departments for their IT projects to succeed, particularly when so many major public sector IT projects have been characterised by delay, overspend and poor performance.

Even the biggest projects can be halted for seemingly mundane reasons, with one of the largest departmental IT crashes in recent UK government history apparently being caused by a simple network operating system upgrade. So given the increased focus on public sector IT performance, what steps can you take to reduce the risk of IT project failure?

Despite these pressures, it’s surprising how little focus UK public sector organisations apply to the in-depth testing of their IT projects. According to EDS, one of the leading suppliers of IT solutions and services to government organisations, testing is one of the critical success factors for successful IT programme management, and they believe that organisations should “never compress or eliminate thorough testing”.

Unfortunately they do! Ken Veitch, the Managing Director of DeRisk IT, a leading expert in de-risking and testing, believes: “it’s not that public sector organisations aren’t aware of the need for testing; it’s more likely that managers simply haven’t made any provision in their IT budget. Many respected IT project management methodologies suggest that the testing phase of a project should take up about a third of the overall project, but in our experience the reality is that testing accounts for less than 10 per cent of time, with some organisations not factoring it in at all!”

For those organisations that don’t test their applications, there are usually three reasons for this oversight – they’ve either forgotten about it, they find enterprise-class performance and load testing too expensive, or they’ve probably got a technology solution that’s proved simply too difficult to test with standard off-the-shelf tools.

As the leading UK-based supplier of IT performance and load testing solutions, Facilita has developed one of the industry’s broadest ranges of enterprise-class products and services to help ensure the integrity and reliability of today’s mission-critical government applications. Working with both major central government departments and local authorities, the company has spent over ten years refining its testing approach for public sector organisations.

Making testing more accessible
Cost is probably the key issue for most customers. While some projects may have set aside budget for the initial performance and load testing of an application, the reality is that public sector projects can have lengthy lifecycles.

Evolving testing requirements also mean that simple testing software license agreements don’t always prove flexible enough. It’s quite normal for central government to move applications development and testing from site to site – particularly if there are outsourcing partners involved. Some government customers are also becoming increasingly frustrated with the more restrictive licensing regimes of US test software vendors, who seem to think that charging $20,000 a week for a software license is something that will sit easily within inflexible public sector IT budgets!

At Facilita we’ve always tried to adopt a more flexible pricing and licensing regime – effectively making it easier for organisations to commit to the testing their projects require. One Facilita partner that has found this to its advantage is Capgemini. According to Jon Lindsay, formerly the Performance and Testing Team Leader at Capgemini, Facilita’s flexibility has proved a valuable factor on a number of projects. “On fixed price public sector contracts it’s all about optimising performance, and with testing that means not just the software but also the support and service that goes with that. Working with Facilita on projects such as Croydon Council we’ve been able to deliver complete testing projects (including services) for less than the cost we were quoted for a simple protocol plug-in for a rival testing solution.”

Dealing with public sector complexity
In a perfect world we’d of course all be running standard IT applications on standard hardware using standard communications and network protocols. Look at many of the testing tools available and you might think that’s what the software testing vendors think too! The day-to-day reality – particularly in the public sector is very different, with departments and authorities operating in a non-standard world, where out-of-the-box testing solutions very rarely apply.

DeRisk IT’s Ken Veitch, who has worked closely with Facilita on projects for organisations such as Hampshire County Council, believes this is especially the case in the public sector. “There’s a very broad spread of applications and platforms in central and local government, from earlier generation ICL mainframes running green-screen applications, right through to some of the latest PDA and WAP-based public access applications. Our job is to handle the testing of these applications, and then look beyond that to consider the performance engineering aspects of how they work alongside existing hardware, middleware and database software. Unfortunately there aren’t any shortcuts here, it’s either do it properly or get it wrong!”

That’s why Facilita supports the broadest range of technologies and protocols, and offers an extensible toolkit for load, regression and functional testing. The Facilita testing solution is designed to effectively test web servers, databases, distributed Java applications, client/server systems and networking protocols.

Understanding longer-term testing requirements
When asked how much of his budget he spent on testing, Ron Dennis, CEO and Chairman of the McLaren F1 team answered: “all of it.” For successful teams like McLaren, testing is a way of life – and it’s much the same for long-term IT projects. The reality is that some of the largest central government IT projects are immensely complex, and every new application release has to be rigorously tested. For some applications you might need to simulate thousands of concurrent users, all entering different data, with different logins and User IDs. Not surprisingly this can get very complex very quickly.

Some of these testing scripts can be as much as 20,000 lines of code long, and it can take weeks for organisations to build scripts once a software build is ready for testing. At Facilita we’ve worked closely with a major Government department and its prime IT contractor to help create a series of application-specific recorder/generator code components that can be quickly configured within days so that testing can get underway much more quickly. This level of testing and co-operation can only come about from a close working relationship, detailed knowledge of the customer and its IT infrastructure, and deep testing expertise.

So whether it’s developing a solution to provide server response testing for a hub/spoke architecture, delivering DHCP protocol support within a tight timescale, ensuring legacy integration with traditional green-screen applications or enabling the cost effective testing of complex Web and Java-based systems, Facilita has the expertise to support the most demanding UK public sector testing requirements.

Unlike other major performance testing specialists, Facilita is headquartered in the UK and is able to deliver complex, enterprise-class performance and load testing solutions at less than half the cost of solutions from more traditional testing vendors, while the company’s easy-to-administer licensing and flexible commercial solutions make the company an ideal partner for the many Government IT departments with complex, multi-site operations.

The company also works closely with an expanding network of UK and European partners, including major global organisations such as Capgemini and EDS as well as specialist IT Risk Mitigation businesses such as DeRisk IT. For further information about Facilita and its enterprise-class performance and load testing approach, please visit www.facilita.co.uk or call the company on 0870 4058088.