Wholesaler delights members with year-round shopping experiences by using OpenText™ Core Enterprise Performance Engineering solutions to optimize application performance testing

About the customer

This company operates an exclusive warehouse club for individuals and businesses, using its immense buying power to offer its members tremendous savings.

Industry:

Retail

Summary

Challenges

Millions of members shop online during peak periods.
Testing applications pre-deployment was time-consuming.
On-premises infrastructure generated significant cost and maintenance workloads.

Solution

Expanded automation to enhance testing efficiency.
Enabled seamless collaboration.
Supported always-on testing.

Results

Accelerated application development cycles
Achieved 60+% reduction in performance test volumes
Ensured excellent member service around the clock

Challenges

Millions of members shop online at peak times
Application testing was time-consuming
On-premises infrastructure generated significant costs

As one of the most successful and well-respected warehouse clubs in the world, this wholesaler remains committed to providing top quality goods to its members at the lowest possible prices.

As well as running brick-and-mortar warehouses across four continents, the company operates ecommerce websites and provides exclusive deals to members via a mobile app. To run all of these stores successfully and profitably, it’s crucial to keep the core applications and systems underpinning operations running smoothly.

“Providing responsive, engaging and easy-to-use applications and websites is a fundamental part of delivering excellent member services in the digital era,” explained a spokesperson. “Any issues with our core systems or applications could cause disruption and frustration for our members. To prevent this, we work diligently to test every single line of code that goes into our member-facing and back-office operations.”

Ecommerce traffic, mobile app usage, and in-store footfall vary significantly throughout the year. During peak times like Black Friday, millions of members flock to stores and websites. “Making sure that our applications can handle peak loads is just as crucial as eliminating bugs during the development cycle,” said the spokesperson. “A significant proportion of net sales happens in the run up to seasonal holidays when visits to our app, website, and warehouses surge. If our applications cannot handle these increases in demand, we could potentially lose out on a huge number of sales, or even lose members.”

While many companies have struggled to keep pace with volatile economic conditions and inflationary pressures, the wholesaler has achieved sustained growth in recent years. To keep pace with this impressive growth trend, IT leaders looked to step up their performance testing activities.

For many years, performance engineers adopted a shift-right approach to application testing and carried out the vast majority of performance tests just before moving software into production. While this methodology enabled the company to ensure always-on availability for its core systems, it was time-consuming and generated significant costs for the business. On-premises testing tools were also a significant cost factor, and performance engineers spent a lot of their working days managing and maintaining the infrastructure supporting their testing activities.

All developers can access OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering via Azure and run their own tests as part of their continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. Being able to give all our developers access to a single user interface really helps to improve collaboration and simplify testing workflows.

Spokesperson
Leading wholesaler

Solution

To identify and resolve issues earlier in the development cycle, the wholesaler targeted a shift-left approach for performance testing. To achieve this, it deployed OpenText™ Core Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) and OpenText™ Core Performance Engineering for Developers (LoadRunner Developer).

Products deployed

OpenText™ Core Enterprise Performance Engineering

Performance testing software that lets development teams across the globe share load testing resources
OpenText™ Core Performance Engineering

Easily plan, run, and scale performance tests without the need to deploy and manage infrastructure

Expanding automation to enhance efficiency

The wholesaler has harnessed OpenText solutions to support application performance testing for over a decade. Today, it uses OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering, OpenText Core Performance Engineering for Developers and OpenText™ Core Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Cloud) to support all performance testing activities.

“Successfully moving our testing earlier in development is currently the top priority for our performance engineering team,” said the spokesperson. “To make our vision a reality, we are leveraging the extensive automation capabilities in OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering and OpenText Core Performance Engineering for Developers to remove as many manual processes from our performance testing workloads as possible. Having personally used OpenText solutions for over 15 years, I was confident that OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering was the best solution to help us enhance and accelerate performance testing.”

Enabling seamless collaboration

To provide both in-house developers and contractors with a range of powerful testing tools, the wholesaler integrated OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering and OpenText Core Performance Engineering for Developers with Microsoft® Azure DevOps—giving developers a one-stop solution for all their performance testing needs.

“Because OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering is so intuitive and widely used by the developer community, we knew it would be a great solution for supporting collaboration between our in-house performance engineers and external developers,” said the spokesperson. “Now all developers can access OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering via Azure and run their own tests as part of their continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. Being able to give all our developers access to a single user interface really helps to improve collaboration and simplify testing workflows.”

Ensuring always-on testing with responsive support

To support frictionless testing, OpenText also provides ongoing support for the wholesaler’s OpenText Core Performance Engineering solutions. “We have built a really close relationship with OpenText over the years and their support has always been excellent,” explained the spokesperson. “Whenever we open a support ticket OpenText always responds promptly and helps us to resolve any problems effectively.”

With rapid, flexible, and cost-efficient performance testing powered by OpenText solutions, we can ensure even more flawless software development and provide our members with frictionless in-store and online shopping experiences.

Spokesperson
Leading wholesaler

Results

The company is now firmly on track to complete its shift-left on performance testing—a move that will accelerate application development companywide. Migrating to cloud-based performance testing solutions has also unlocked huge IT savings.

Accelerated application development and testing

Once complete, the shift-left transformation will help to reduce the cost and time required to complete performance tests, while still ensuring detailed load and performance testing across a wide range of potential scenarios.

“By bringing performance and load testing to an earlier stage in the development workflow, we are much more likely to spot issues sooner,” explained the spokesperson. “Identifying and resolving issues earlier on ultimately helps to shorten the development cycle without any impact on quality or performance. Faster development cycles will not only help us to release new versions of our core systems more regularly, but also reduce the cost of performance testing and improve the quality of our software.”

Achieved 60+ percent reduction in performance test volumes

When a developer adds new code into their application, this automatically triggers a performance unit test in OpenText Performance Engineering for Developers, giving them a preview of the performance of their code. They can then optimize the performance at this early stage, saving significant time and effort compared with finding and fixing performance bugs post-integration.

“With OpenText Performance Engineering for Developers, which is essentially shift-left performance unit testing, we save a lot of time in fixing defects—from days to hours,” said the spokesperson. “This also reduces the number of tests that we run post-integration. If we used to run 100 tests on OpenText Core Enterprise Performance Engineering, we're now maybe running only 30 or 40 tests because those bugs were already ironed out before we reach the performance environment.”

Ensured excellent member service 24/7

With faster, more cost-effective application development and performance testing, the wholesaler can invest more time and resources in ecommerce innovation.

“We’re excited about what the future holds for us and we’re just at the start of this new phase in our OpenText journey,” said the spokesperson. “With rapid, flexible and cost-efficient performance testing powered by OpenText solutions, we can ensure flawless software development and provide our members with frictionless in-store and online shopping experiences.”