Marshall Industries, an electronics distributor that began a wholesale shift to e-commerce in 1994, knows that most of the increases in traffic to its web site are caused by new marketing initiatives, such as bringing a subsidiary online, says Raj Jha, Marshall s director of electronic commerce. Marshall uses load testing and performance-monitoring tools to gauge utilization of resources, such as bandwidth, application servers, database servers, etc. The many moving parts of Net applications and the multiple technologies that comprise these parts complicate the process of certifying Net applications as production-ready. Functional testing tools specifically designed for the Internet can help you verify that the application s physical structure is intact and that the application s features conform to specifications. The tools will also help ensure that changes to one part of the application will not cause problems elsewhere.
Functional testing can also document the response time of user data entry with 'Net applications.
Poor response time could also be caused by poorly designed code. If the latter is the case, performance analysis and optimization tools can help your developers pinpoint precisely which lines of code or functions are the slowest, so that those lines and functions can be tuned and re-tested. Another place to investigate is the physical structure of the application. Analysts at Hurwitz Group spoke to one company that was frustrated by the lack of success with monthly sales specials advertised on its web site. The problem turned out to be not the sale itself, but the fact that no visitors had seen the advertisements on the site.