Our customer is one of the largest retail chains selling electronics and household appliances.
The company implemented a full-fledged omnichannel approach to sales, which means a unified product assortment, prices, and services, whether buying in stores or online. The stores share format and conceptual design. In addition to an effective retail format and a store concept that is customer-oriented, the company also offers high-quality customer service.
PFLB was hired to test an integrated set of SAP systems, particularly with respect to system performance.
These are the integrated systems:
Our Team Faced the Following Tasks:
- determine whether the systems being tested meet the performance requirements before and after the transformation;
- determine whether performance worsened after the transformation;
- identify processes that need to be optimized, if any;
- determine whether performance worsened as a result of optimization.
Our Solution
To achieve the objectives associated with the project, we conducted tests in which we emulated traffic generated by users and external systems, and background jobs were launched.
To emulate user load on the SAP ERP system, we used the SAP GUI protocol. The system included tasks that corresponded closely to the scheduling in the production environment.
The main load on the SAP PI system comes from data streams from other systems. They were emulated by sending XML files via the SOAP protocol and uploading files to an FTP server.
The load was emulated according to the test scenarios with the specified intensity. The composition of the tested operations was established based on the customer’s expert opinion. Operations were chosen according to the following criteria:
- being business-critical, performed daily, and affecting sales or logistics operations in the system;
- loading the system significantly;
- transformation is expected to result in increased load from the operation.
Information about the target load and SLAs was obtained during interviews with functional consultants.
After each test, we analyzed the results. The load was applied using LoadRunner and Apache JMeter. While these tools worked well for our SAP testing needs, teams working on different types of projects might want to explore a comparison of Gatling vs. JMeter to find the most suitable testing solution for their specific requirements.
The intensity of scenario execution by each virtual user depends on the scenario, system response times, and the amount of delay between two consecutive iterations. In the process of testing, the total intensity of scenario execution by all virtual users (the simulated load on the information system) was changed by adjusting the number of virtual users performing the scenarios and changing the amount of delay between successive iterations. While we primarily used LoadRunner for this project, there are several LoadRunner alternatives for scalable load testing that offer similar capabilities for enterprise-level performance testing.
