IBM > Case Studies > andagon Enhances Application Performance with SAP and IBM

andagon Enhances Application Performance with SAP and IBM

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
Cybersecurity & Privacy - Identity & Authentication Management

Applicable Industries

Construction & Infrastructure
Equipment & Machinery

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Experimentation Automation
Visual Quality Detection

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

andagon GmbH is a renowned consulting company in the field of quality assurance, specializing in software testing, process and test automation. Headquartered in Cologne, Germany, andagon employs more than 50 quality experts. The company has developed aqua, a comprehensive software solution designed to improve application lifecycle management by integrating quality management into IT project management. aqua revolutionizes the software business processes in IT projects by enrolling all parties in the process: business users, project leaders, analysts, developers and testers, and creates more transparency through improved control and communication – including internationally-distributed teams. The company’s consultants help customers across multiple sectors to implement test automation and quality assurance processes including functional testing and performance testing. For those customers developing and using SAP applications, andagon offers a comprehensive range of tailored testing services designed to optimize performance and reliability.

The Challenge

andagon GmbH, a renowned consulting company specializing in software testing, process and test automation, often encounters clients who have identified quality issues or performance bottlenecks during the implementation phase of their applications. These clients turn to andagon to analyze the difficulties and develop a customized test plan to efficiently address the performance issues. In typical commercial environments, software testing is often delayed until the end of a project, increasing the pressure on the testing team and process. To assess the performance of a complex application quickly and effectively, efficient tools are required to create and execute the relevant test cases. Thousands of companies rely on SAP software to run their core business processes, and need to make sure that application errors do not disrupt business operations. Particularly for manufacturing companies, system downtime can cause significant financial damage. If software quality and performance issues are spotted at a late stage in a development project, the costs and delays incurred by corrective work damages companies’ abilities to reach their goals.

The Solution

andagon advises its customers to integrate testing into general development processes to monitor software quality throughout the project and avoid discovering functional or performance issues at the end of an implementation. As an IBM Business Partner, andagon is a strong advocate of the comprehensive IBM toolset for application development and testing. IBM Rational Performance Tester provides a broad range of features to enable efficient performance testing, and helps to identify application architecture and infrastructure bottlenecks. A simple graphical user interface allows for the creation of test cases without the need to write code, and integrated test data management enables flexible and dynamic customization of test cases. IBM Rational Performance Tester automatically executes tests with dynamically generated test data, and tracks the dynamic data throughout the tests to ensure that correct, useful test results are generated. IBM Rational Performance Tester uses flexible IBM Rational Performance Tester Agents to generate the performance test load. The load test agents emulate user behavior to generate a workload that is as similar as possible to real users.

Operational Impact

At the wholesale logistics company, andagon was able to identify slow transactions that by themselves appeared to be insignificant yet could potentially cause the business process to freeze. Thanks to the comprehensive performance test, the company was able to identify and investigate the performance limitations of the equipment used in its shipping department and successfully eliminate the issues that would have caused severe business disruptions in production operations. With detailed performance reports, the project team was able to provide the application developers with accurate feedback about bottlenecks and performance issues, which led to optimizations in customized SAP ERP functionality. As a result, the company was able to avoid the delay and expense of application re-engineering, and avoid the cost of new processor and memory resources, in the certainty that the new solution was able to handle peak workloads, comfortably.

Quantitative Benefit

Application throughput was improved by 100 percent, from 6,000 units per day to 12,000 units per day.
In a second project, it was ensured that a certain operation was completed in less than one second for 90 percent of all users.
For another customer, the stability of an application was proven with a test running over one week to detect memory leaks and other application issues that cannot be detected with simple test cases.