Compuware has unloaded its new load-testing solution focused on performance and scalability problems across the entire application delivery chain. Compuware Gomez 360° Web Load Testing has been billed with marketing synonyms ranging from end-to-end, to 360 degree focused and onward, to "first mile to last mile" functional. What the product does do is bring together two testing solutions — Gomez Web Load Testing and dynaTrace Test Center Edition — into one integrated offering.
This new solution aims to identify "user experience performance problems" and isolate their root cause down to the line of code. This saves time and money by enabling collaboration across organizations throughout the application lifecycle and reducing testing iterations.
Thomas Murphy, research director at Gartner, has suggested that there is an increasing market need for enhancing traditional load-test solutions with server-side performance monitoring solutions. "Today's web applications have increased in complexity and dependency on third-party content and services. Blind spots are increasing, yet business is pressurizing IT to deliver faster, which creates increased potential for very costly failures in production. The ability to have a complete view of performance enables the test and development team to work together in a more efficient way to drill down from user experience to where the issues are," said Murphy.
Compuware points to the new reality of the modern application delivery chain, which has become more complex with content and web services delivered to end users' browsers from multiple sources. An average web transaction includes components delivered from over eight hosts — many originating outside the data center such as content delivery networks (CDNs), news feeds, ads, analytics, bill payment, and e-commerce platforms.
"While deep-diagnostics is no substitute for programmer-level performance testing, it certainly increases the odds of being able to conclusively identify and resolve the performance issues that will only present themselves during late lifecycle testing or production monitoring quickly, and with minimum churn," said Scott Barber, an expert in application performance testing.
Gomez 360° Web Load Testing uses dynaTrace's PurePath technology for transaction-pure detail, complete with code-level context, for 100 percent of the transactions run during load testing. All sessions are recorded continuously for off-line analysis and team collaboration. This detail is said to provide visibility into how applications behave under load and spots problems in an organization's own and third-party code.
