Company profile

ICW Group offers a broad range of insurance products including commercial property, catastrophe (earthquake and flood), workers' compensation, surety bonds, and both personal and business automobile insurance.

ICW Group is a full-service group of companies, also providing claims, risk management services.

Challenges

We were looking for a web application load testing tool to simulate high volume user activity at specific integration points to provide insight into programmatic, architectural, and infrastructure bottlenecks. Without an automated tool, the process of simulating real-world user loads and comparing the metrics on an ongoing basis was not practical.

Application tested: the current web application under test involve new customer auto insurance rating. Additional developer exposed web pages that directly target specific integration points have also been key in our load testing effort as well as in providing essential data during the debugging and testing of application defects and enhancements (both functional and performance related).

Protocols tested: http.

Solution

NeoLoad was chosen because of the balance of functionality, ease of use, and cost. The other option considered was HP (Mercury) LoadRunner which employs a completely unreasonable pricing model.

I have been learning and using the tool on an ongoing and intermittent basis, especially when fast-tracked production issues requiring attention have been brought to light. Over time I have worked with an additional QA team member to make him familiar with the recording and parameterization of actions in the repository as well as the full process of VU, Population, and Scenario building and execution, etc.

Test Results and Added Value

Being able to apply real world user load levels and sequentially acquire comparative metrics in a consistent and repeatable way.

There is an ongoing realized benefit that provides insight into production anomalies, debugging, and testing/assessment of new code and configuration modifications.

NeoLoad’s value to the business is increased testing productivity and improved customer satisfaction /service.