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Customer Success Story Application Delivery Management

University of

University of Copenhagen tests functionality of new exam app for up to 6,000 concurrent users with Micro Focus® StormRunner Load.

Overview that is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The and five other Computers in the exam room have increasingly Danish have combined to imple- replaced pen and paper and now there is a ment a web-based application that allows stu- further development necessitated by growth dents to download and upload exam papers in distance learning and the pure volume of from any location. It had to work success- students. The controlled environment of the fully from day one so comprehensive testing exam room is being superseded by distance was vital. This was achieved with the cloud- digital exams which candidates can download based performance and load testing tool, and complete from any location. StormRunner Load. In line with the Danish government’s exam At a Glance Challenge digitalization strategy, six of the country’s eight universities have collaborated to develop a co- The candidates file into the hall and sit at rows Industry ordinated solution. They are , of desks. At a word from the invigilator, they University, University of Copenhagen, Education turn over the papers and start to write their Copenhagen Business School, Roskilde answers. This tightly controlled environment Location University and from 2017 Technical University is the classic examination scenario but one of Denmark. Challenge “This is an important core service so we needed Ensure the operational efficiency of a new digital “If we had not run this project to have an extremely trustworthy application examination app via rigorous testing. in the way we did, a hit and run that we knew would not fail in a live situation,” Products and Services test like this would have needed says Jorgen Adrian Groskopf, project con- sultant at the University of Copenhagen. “If it StormRunner Load 600GB of memory and 60 CPUs. did not operate efficiently, it would have been When you need this kind of a catastrophe for students and would have Results resource, cloud is the way to also attracted very bad publicity for the uni- + Simulated concurrent download and upload by versities concerned.” 6,000 virtual users. go and that is the value of + Identified problems with certain configurations and StormRunner Load.” database items. The system had to be rigorously tested to + Verified a system that is now processing 300,000 ensure that it could cope with thousands of Jesper Mortensen examinations a year. concurrent users and still operate successfully + Saved 75% of test costs through hourly pay-as- Project Manager from day one. you-go licensing model. aHOC “There is no other way to enable 6,000 students to take an examination at the same time but if we had launched this system without prior testing from StormRunner Load it would have failed.”

Jorgen Adrian Groskopf Project Manager University of Copenhagen

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Solution “We needed to ensure that the website was “This is good news for our students because None of the five universities had the in-house able to handle this large file at the same time when you are taking an examination it’s not skills to thoroughly test the application. The as going full speed without having to stop doing acceptable if it takes a long time to download University of Copenhagen (UCPH) sought everything else in order to upload.” the paper and even worse if, having completed help from a company it had worked with in the examination, you can’t upload it again. This the past—Danish consultancy aHOC which Mortensen specializes in using Micro Focus system has completely eliminated the need for lists testing and quality assurance among its testing tools and for this project he selected paper and it has made our workflows much many specialisms. Micro Focus StormRunner Load. A cloud- more efficient.” based performance and load testing tool for “The university asked us to conduct perfor- web and mobile-based apps, StormRunner is The pay-as-you-go licensing available with mance tests on the part of its website which a scalable, agile solution that allows tests to be StormRunner made the solution financially allows students to download and upload ex- conducted from anywhere on any device. Load attractive for the universities, as Mortensen aminations,” explains aHOC project manager tests can be created by executing open source explains: “Other testing solutions have an up- Jesper Mortensen. “They created all the test JMeter scripts in ad­dition­ to LoadRunner web/ front cost. You have to buy licences for a certain cases and test data and I did the scripting. It http and TruClient,­ JavaScript-based TruAPI, number of virtual users but with StormRunner, works in two ways. The students can be off- and HAR file-based scripts. you buy virtual user hours. This was a hit and site, at home, and download an exam paper run test—not one that had to be done every or they can also use it for on-site exams. This Scripts can be uploaded and tests run in minutes week or month—so buying a tool and paying testing was for UCPH and a community of four and can be scaled from 1,000 to 1,000,000 maintenance didn’t make any sense.” other Danish universities who use this website.” virtual users with the ability to specify geo- graphical locations so real network conditions Using the old method of charging by virtual Each of the universities wanted the capabil- can be simulated. Intelligent analytics identify user would have been much more expensive. ity to provide exams for 1,000 students at a bottlenecks and give a holistic view with client, With its StormRunner package, UCPH paid time so aHOC had to test for 6,000 concurrent network and server-side breakdown reports so by virtual user hours which reduced the cost students downloading a paper and uploading users can conduct a root cause analysis and by 75%. the results one hour later. The precise targets quickly remediate issues. “In the end we scripted this using a program were that all candidates must be able to down- that has a very small footprint but we could load the examination paper in 10 minutes and Results have chosen one of the new hot LoadRunner upload their completed paper in 15 minutes. When aHOC’s StormRunner scripts were ap- protocols which would have a footprint of The universities provided aHOC with relevant plied to the UCPH website it revealed prob- hundreds of megabytes per user. Executing a statistics on the size of the examination papers lems, as Groskopf explains: “The downloads test like this would require 600GB of memory that needed to be uploaded. and uploads were failing, big time, so we had to make changes to our configurations and part and maybe 60 CPUs which would be equiva- lent to a server farm of 10 machines. Using “Another thing we wanted to test was that of the database which means that the testing StormRunner you don’t have to worry about these files could be uploaded without affecting was a great success. this. You just start your test and StormRunner other uploads being run on student systems. To will allocate the resources from the cloud. If do this we uploaded a 2GB file manually on top Following the changes, the system has now you need 600GB it will do that. With our test, of the other two scenarios and the test was a been used by all the universities for six months it ended up allocating four machines but if we success,” explains Mortensen. and has not failed. In this year alone, we anti­ cipate that it will deal with 300,000 examina- needed 60, StormRunner would have handled tion papers. it,” concludes Mortensen.

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