E-business success is all in the testing

David Chalmers is a long-serving executive at one of the IT industry’s most long-established firms. Crawley-based Macro 4 is a developer of a wide range of software solutions, including systems management suites and document management tools. With a customer base comprising 3,000 global enterprises, the company’s core aim, according to Chalmers, is to ensure businesses run as smoothly as possible.

Macro 4 has its roots in the mainframe computing boom of the late 1960s, and still derives a lot of its business from datacentre operators. “The firm has been around for 40-odd years, making it one of the oldest software companies in the world,” said Chalmers. “We’ve been dealing with mainframes for at least that long, and it is still a growing business for us.”

As director of product strategy at Macro 4, Chalmers is always on the lookout for new areas of potential growth. One field that has proved especially lucrative for the vendor recently is application testing. “The internet has caused a boom in testing because firms want to expose so many of their applications to it,” he said.

Macro 4 has for a number of years offered a range of fault analysis and performance testing solutions aimed at IBM mainframe environments, and has since begun offering tools aimed at tackling complex multi-platform Java application performance issues. For example, Application Performance Portal is designed to help enterprises ensure that their web presence exceeds customer expectations, Chalmers said.

While the business case for using online systems to boost interaction with customers, partners and employees is strong, it is not without inherent risks, Chalmers warned. Unfortunately, with IT under increasing pressure to cut costs, many companies are failing to mitigate these risks by skimping on areas such as testing.

“In many cases IT spending is going through the floor, and IT departments are being forced to justify every pound they spend,” Chalmers said. “But firms have to remember that IT is at the heart of the business. Consider what happens if you don’t get things right before something goes live, think of the brand damage that that can cause.”

For some industries, the need to ensure public-facing systems are vigorously tested before going live should be absolutely paramount, argues Chalmers, citing the banking sector as an obvious case in point.

“In the past, banking systems would have been faced internally, but now with the internet those banks are exposing applications to up to a million new users. That brings with it an exponential increase in complexity,” he said. “If there is a problem, it is no longer acceptable to say that something is working slowly, you have to be able to look inside it. It is difficult to pinpoint a problem without tools, but if you can identify what it is then you can solve the issue quickly.”

Chalmers said that the opening of Heathrow Terminal 5 was a good example of what can happen when systems are not adequately tested. “There are many projects that just don’t make it because the people charged with overseeing them fail to make sure that things will work properly before they move into the delivering phase,” he said. “Look at Heathrow Terminal 5. That was an almost complete failure, and why? Because they didn’t test it enough. T5 was a big project, and it would have been really hard to test all of it, but what they did test didn’t scale. They tested for 100 bags, but had to deal with 15,000.”

Unfortunately, Chalmers said, testing is often seen as being boring, and therefore struggles to attract people with the right skills. One way round this is to automate the process as much as possible, he added. “Developers hate testing, they want to focus on the features and the functions, while management find it difficult and expensive,” Chalmers said. “But you have to be able to simulate real workloads and that’s complicated. You need tools to do that. Firms should remember that it costs pounds to fix a problem in development, but it costs much more to fix one when something is live.”

Chalmers said one of the keys to application testing was to start as early in the development process as possible, and to take a holistic approach. “You must test load, performance and functions. If these don’t work, people will go somewhere else. That is a measurable pain, a financial pain,” he added.