WienIT GmbH (www.wienit.at) is the digital backbone of the Wiener Stadtwerke Group. As the central IT and business partner, WienIT works behind the scenes to ensure that processes run smoothly for the group companies on the front end. Its 600 employees support 10 group companies, 10,000 workplaces, 1,200 servers, and 130 SAP systems. With smart services for a smart Vienna, WienIT keeps Wiener Stadtwerke up and running — always there for the city.

Maximilian Bauer embodies this mission. As Head of Software Quality Services at WienIT, he and his team are responsible for the user experience of the end customers of Wiener Linien, Wien Energie, and Wiener Netze. No fewer than 15,000 people work at Wiener Stadtwerke — and all 15,000 rely on IT that simply works.

“Delivering the best possible quality means that people taking the subway, buying a ticket online, or choosing an energy tariff from Wien Energie get exactly what they are looking for — without errors and without ever needing to think about the software behind it,” Bauer says, defining his mission.

Industry: IT Services and IT Consulting
Location: Vienna
Products:
- Tricentis NeoLoad

Performance testing as a new asset

Bauer is fully aware that, as an internal software service provider, he must do his IT homework to ensure this level of quality. He understands the importance of software testing. “Testing is an integral part of our DevOps processes and one of the most important components when it comes to trust in updates or new developments,” Bauer explains.

Years ago, Bauer introduced automated functional end‑to‑end tests at WienIT, and Tricentis Tosca has been used for this purpose ever since. When the migration to S/4HANA in the SAP environment was scheduled for early 2022, it was time to expand WienIT’s internal software testing pyramid with another key component: load and performance testing.

“Adding performance testing to our service portfolio was a strategic decision — one we did not take lightly,” Bauer adds.

Early successes dispel initial skepticism

Performance testing is one thing — convincing internal customers to actually use the service is another. The initial reaction was that it was too complex and complicated, and that the results would offer little value. Skepticism prevailed. This skepticism, however, was quickly dispelled thanks to the performance-testing specialists at triscon.

Roman Ferstl, CEO and Performance Engineer at triscon, looks back and explains the secret to his team’s success: “We focused on building close, personal relationships with the business units and involving them early in the SAP project. That proved to be absolutely the right approach. The straightforward working style and the ‘Du’ culture at WienIT, which enabled collaboration on equal footing, certainly helped as well,” Ferstl recalls.

From then on, Bauer and the triscon experts no longer had to work hard to convince people of the new service. The pioneering work during the SAP migration project, the performance testing results — especially the well-prepared reports — and the positive feedback spoke for themselves. By now, around one-third of the SAP environment has been successfully migrated, with the remainder planned through 2025. More importantly, what started as a singlet has expanded. Increasingly, customers are approaching Bauer with requests to use performance testing for other software projects. In short, performance testing has quickly established itself as a service at WienIT.

Tricentis NeoLoad – simple, codeless, efficient

In addition to triscon’s expertise, the technology also played a key role: Tricentis NeoLoad. Based on their positive experience with Tosca, the decision quickly shifted in favor of Tricentis’ modern performance engineering solution.

“Because NeoLoad allows us to easily reuse Tosca test cases for performance testing, we avoid duplicate work and reduce maintenance effort at the same time. The codeless test design also helps us build complex test cases easily, without any programming knowledge.” – Maximilian Bauer, Head of Software Quality Services at WienIT

Although Bauer was entering new territory with NeoLoad and performance testing, the implementation and the process of getting used to it went smoothly. The biggest challenge was not the testing itself, but setting up and sizing the performance testing infrastructure on terminal servers at WienIT.

“The initial hardware sizing was too small, which meant that during the first tests we couldn’t meet our performance testing requirements and, for example, recorded slow and inefficient database queries. But that’s normal in iterative processes and was quickly resolved,” Bauer explains. A few adjustments here and additional resources there — and the simulations and test scenarios with up to 300 concurrent users were running exactly as expected.

Test strategy for even more added value in the future

auer is satisfied. With the support of triscon and Tricentis NeoLoad, he and WienIT now have a performance testing infrastructure that will create even more value in the future. The Head of Software Quality Services is convinced of this, as the next performance testing projects are already on the horizon.

To give the topic even greater importance within the Wiener Stadtwerke Group, Bauer is pursuing a clear strategy. On the one hand, he is expanding internal resources around performance testing; on the other hand, he acts as an advocate and ambassador for the topic himself: “Performance testing gives our customers the certainty and confidence that software works and that the user experience is not diminished by long loading times or even crashes — and that is exactly what, in today’s digital world, makes the difference between good and bad software and thus between success and failure.”

Tricentis Partner:

Get started with Tricentis

Get started