In May, FCS partnered with Total Performance Consulting (TPC) to design a comprehensive performance testing process, execute multiple rounds of testing, identify breaking points, and work with the SaaS platform provider to resolve scalability issues before school started in August. TPC selected NeoLoad as the performance testing solution that would enable FCS to launch the new SaaS school management system with a high degree of confidence — and implement continuous testing to ensure that as the district continues to grow, the system can grow alongside.
FCS had only three months before school started to migrate from its existing on-premises SIS to a completely new SaaS-based platform. It was to be a complete migration, as the two systems could not run concurrently. The SaaS platform had never been deployed on a school district as large as FCS. The district needed to be certain that when it cut over to the new SaaS platform, there would be no performance issues for the 2,000 concurrent users.
First, because the new SIS was a completely unknown platform for FCS — and responsible for so many different parts of school administration — TPC had to narrow the scope of the performance testing plan. It would not be possible to test everything, so TPC focused on the key activities with the highest impact on school operations.
Second, FCS needed to benchmark performance before and after the migration and find scalability issues. TPC designed a comprehensive testing process that mimicked usage in production of the existing SIS. That required a highly complex data management plan since the process of enrolling students, creating a family, selecting and registering for classes, removing courses, etc., involves large amounts of data that are shared and utilized multiple times. The performance testing plan included not only load tests for 2,000 concurrent users across many key use cases and scenarios but also spike tests and endurance tests. Because the SaaS platform had never been subjected to a deployment this big, the team anticipated many rounds of testing as TPC worked hand-in-hand with the SaaS platform vendor to test, monitor, identify, and resolve performance issues. The plan was on an aggressive three-month schedule (May to July) in order for the new system to be up and running with no performance issues when school started in August. The team was under the gun to perform a lot of complex end-to-end testing on an unknown platform in a very short period of time.
NeoLoad met all the challenges. First and foremost, NeoLoad enabled multiple rounds of very complex test cycles to run very quickly. This was crucial given the time crunch FCS was under and the amount of testing required for an unknown platform. TPC simply did not have the luxury of weeks long test cycles needed with other enterprise-grade performance testing tools. NeoLoad reduces test cycles from weeks to days. NeoLoad typically accelerates test cycles by 75% on average, due to its ease of use and automation features.
