The vast majority of this was due to changes in processes and the gathering of additional data from clients while on the phone. As well, for future purchase decisions it was felt to be important to know what are the client computing requirements for the Banner system. For those two reasons, a series of timing tests were performed on personal computers within Public Affairs, under conditions as close as possible to normal operation.
Many factors affect the performance observed at a client workstation.
A series of tests were undertaken which tried to isolate any differences due to computing hardware and workload, and an experiment methodology was used in an attempt to control these variables. As if was felt to be more important to mimic normal daily operations than to ensure reproducible results, the degree of error in these tests may be quite high, as opposed to standalone tests performed in off-hours with no other load on the systems. The tests were designed to observe the times required to perform common forms actions, and database queries. The forms tested are all among the top ten largest forms, and include the largest form. The purpose of the testing was to determine which factors have a significant impact upon observed performance.