Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Belgian Post Office Cuts Stress Testing Solution Costs by 40 Per Cent
Overview
Country or Region:Belgium
Industry:Government—Postal
Customer Profile
With 35,000 employees, Belgian De Post—La Poste (DPLP) sells traditional mail products, provides financial services, and markets third-party services such as mobile phone cards and lottery tickets.
Business Situation
DPLP wanted a cost-effective performance-testing product for testing a Web application to replace its existing system.
Solution
After an evaluation of the market, DPLP chose Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent.
Benefits
Total cost of ownership cut by 40 percent.
Productivity rises by up to 30 percent.
Quality of stress testing improves.
Better customer service. / “For major releases, our developers cut the time taken by half with Visual Studio Team System. The comparable time saving for minor releases was about 25 percent.”
Bart Timmermans, Project Lead, De Post—La Poste
The Belgian Post Office De Post—La Poste (DPLP) is currently undergoing extensive modernisation to meet the challenge of increased competition and deregulation. DPLP has worked with Microsoft in designing a Web-based end-to-end solution for improving its post office counter services. After a recent evaluation, DPLP replaced its industry standard stress test product for testing its Web application with Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Team Test Load Agent and Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System development suite. As a result, DPLP has reduced the total cost of ownership of its stress testing solution by more than 40 percent. It no longer incurs an annual maintenance charge, which was around 20 percent a year on top of the original cost. The time taken by its developers to carry out its stress test cycles for postal counter service products has been reduced by up to 30 percent and quality has been improved.
Situation
De Post—La Poste (DPLP) has been undergoing a major restructuring process since 2000 to respond to the progressive liberalisation of the European Union postal sector. With some 35,000 employees, 1,200 post offices, and 200 postal points, DPLP sells traditional mail products, provides financial services, and markets third-party services such as mobile phone cards and lottery tickets.
The company’s management has defined four objectives to survive in a highly competitive market:
Reduction of costs.
Improvement of service quality.
Provision of a wider range of services to mail customers.
Development of a robust retail network of post offices.
Collaboration with Microsoft is a central feature of the DPLP modernisation strategy. In May 2002, the group transformed its retail services. It deployed a complete, Web-based solution for its post office counter services,designed by Microsoft. Named PostStation, the solution was developed in 2001 and 2002, and replaced a largely manual system.
PostStation uses a Windows® operating system and database technology, and integrates all front-office and some back-office business processes supporting mail, retail, and banking services. It is a centralised but open and scalable system for around 5,000 users, and is vital in helping DPLP achieve its overall strategy of greater efficiency and marketing dynamism.
DPLP was already using an industrystandard stress test product for predicting system behaviour and performance. But the technology presented the group’s development team with several challenges, according to Bart Timmermans, Project Lead, DPLP.
“It was very difficult to find developers with specific knowledge of the tool and functional experience with the application,” he says. “They needed to know the C programming language to write the tests. Developers could only write stress test scenarios after stabilising the code.” Other difficulties in using their stress testing tool included:
Scenario creation—slow and error prone.
There was no one-to-one mapping with the actual source code.
Expensive user-based licensing.
Reporting was not template based.
Difficult to relate functional metrics to system metrics.
Success of long-duration tests was not predictable.
“In addition to standard requirements for stress testing, we wanted to speed up test scenario creation with every developer able to write tests and an unlimited number of users at a low cost,” says Timmermans. “We also needed to hide communication implementation from test scenarios, improve test result interpretation by correlation between functional and system metrics, and create easier and faster analysis and reporting—preferably template based.”
DPLP wanted to resolve these technical challenges and, in particular, reduce the number of person-days needed to create test scenarios. As part of its efficiency drive, the company looked for a more cost-effective stress testing solution in view of the then prevailing high maintenance costs.
Solution
The DPLP carried out an extensive analysis comparing the performance and costs of its current solution with Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System, an integrated application life cycle management system, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent.
The Microsoft stress testing tool generates supplemental test loads for software testers, which helps them to simulate more users and more accurately test the performance of Web applications and servers. The study compared the current solution with the Microsoft solution for management of the development of tests, scenario execution, analysis, and reporting.
The tests showed that Visual Studio Team System outperformed the current solution in the following comparisons:
PostStation developers familiar with the programming environment.
Every developer can implement tests.
Support for customised Web Service proxies.
No limit to the number of users—the previous product was restricted to 250 due to licence.
Easy-to-use and customisable analysis and reporting system.
Less time-consuming performance-testing system.
“In addition, by using the Microsoft solution, the functional developer writes the system tests and they are reused in the performance tests,” says Timmermans. “They can be written early in the development cycle and are part of the continuous build process. Our library of system tests to reuse in performance tests will grow quickly.”
Developers at DPLP have also recently been migrated from Microsoft Visual Basic® version 6.0, which is no longer supported by Microsoft, to Microsoft Visual C#® 2005. The PostStation system uses other Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 for its database—previously Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
DPLP operates under a Microsoft Select Licence, a volume licensing programme for medium-sized and large government organisations, which is suited to the group’s mixed software requirements, and ensures a low total cost of ownership for Microsoft technology.
Following the evaluation of Visual Studio Team System, DPLP decided to continue with Visual Studio Team System as its stress test tool. It took 40 person-days to create a toolkit around the Visual Studio Team System Web test framework and between 15 and 20 working days to convert all existing scenarios.
Benefits
DPLP has reduced the total cost of ownership of its stress testing solution by more than 40 percent with Visual Studio Team System. In addition, the group no longer pays an annual maintenance charge and has no limit to the total number of users. The number of person-days to manage test cycles has been reduced by up to 30 percent with the Microsoft tools. Timmermans says: “Visual Studio Team System is a user-friendly stress testing solution that is giving us improved quality with less work and makes us far more productive.”
Microsoft Tools Lower Total Cost of Ownership by More Than 40 Per Cent
The initial cost of the Visual Studio Team System was 90 per cent less than the previous product, but this wasn’t the only saving achieved. The previous product had an annual maintenance contract equivalent to 20 percent of the initial cost, and DPLP was restricted to 250 users, whereas the group needed 300. For every 25 extra users over the 250 there were additional licensing and maintenance charges. Overall, the migration to Microsoft Visual Studio Team System has resulted in a 40 percent lower total cost of ownership, which includes the reduced initial cost compared to the previous product.
“With Visual Studio Team System, the licence can be converted from an existing Microsoft licence,” says Timmermans. “Our two licences for Visual Studio 2005 Test Load Agent come with two years’ free Software Assurance—a Microsoft business training and support programme that takes care of the maintenance at no extra cost.”
Productivity of Developers Increases by Up to 30 Per Cent
Comparisons between Visual Studio Team System and the current solution showed huge savings in person-days for the staple workload of major and minor releases, and infrastructure tests at DPLP.
“For major releases, our developers cut the time taken by one third with Visual Studio Team System,” says Timmermans. “The comparable time saving for minor releases was about 25 percent. Infrastructure testing took two thirds of the time using Microsoft in our working environment.”
Improved Quality of Work by Developers and Testers
The Microsoft stress testing toolkit means testers and developers at the DPLP will achieve vastly improved quality in both scenario creation and execution of internal projects. “We can now spread knowledge sharing over performance tests to the functional teams and no longer have silos within our organisation,” says Timmermans. “It was also a great advantage to be able to reuse scenarios from system testing. Reporting is now template based.”
Faster Turnaround Results in Better Customer Service
Due to the Microsoft stress testing tool kit, the DPLP development and testing team is serving its internal customers faster and benefiting the public who are experiencing improved service at post office counters.
“We have overcome the challenge we experienced with scarce resources to operate the previous system,” says Timmermans. “With Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent, we no longer have to wait until the code is stable before writing test scenarios. We can do it faster and realise the results sooner.”
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organisations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more informationabout Visual Studio 2005, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio