Testing Websites & Applications Under Real-World Network Conditions Prior to Deployment

Nov. 8, 2011 - PRLog -- Keynote Systems , the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring and testing, and Shunra, a recognized authority in Application Performance Engineering (APE), today announced a joint product solution designed to provide meaningful and actionable results in pre-production web application testing environments. By combining Shunra's vCat networking emulation capabilities with Keynote's KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) web application performance tool, Keynote and Shunra customers can now isolate potential performance failures as a result of application design flaws and network infrastructure bottlenecks, prior to production deployment. For further information about the joint solution view: http://ape.shunra.com/KITE_Download.html.

Website Performance: http://www.keynote.com/products/web_performance/web-performance-testing.html


KITE's use of a real Internet Explorer browser and its well-structured scripting and playback environment perfectly complements Shunra vCat's ability to recreate specific network conditions. vCat emulates production network conditions by introducing real-world impairments such as latency, jitter, bandwidth, and packet loss. Using KITE in conjunction with vCat gives IT teams the ability to get real-world, representative results when testing websites and applications.

"By creating real-world network conditions during pre-deployment testing, web applications will be more robust and useful right out of the gate, even before monitoring from remote geographical locations kicks in," said Vik Chaudhary, vice president of product management and corporate development at Keynote. "Our combined offering helps performance engineers accurately test and re-test web transactions while subjecting them to 'last mile' conditions in a lab environment."

Research indicates that even slight online slowdowns frustrate users and cost companies money. According to Aberdeen Group, even a one second delay results in 11 percent fewer page views, a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction and a seven percent decrease in conversions.

"Our combined solution means that QA teams can more accurately model 'on the street' mobile and web usage of applications outside the ideal conditions of the test lab," said Gary Jackson, CEO of Shunra. "If a company wants to really know how its sites and applications will perform in the real world, the Shunra-Keynote solution sets a new bar for accuracy and meaningful results."

Use cases for the joint solution include performance engineering or analyst teams interested in understanding how users in distant locations with less than perfect Internet connections will experience the performance of an application on their end of a web browser. Before releasing web applications from QA (quality assurance), these teams can now test not just the performance of the application itself, but how it will perform when the network is impaired at various levels to emulate real-world conditions.

For example, in lab tests using a major finance site's webpage, KITE testing showed the download speed for the page to be around four seconds from a US-based location. When London-to-New York network conditions were added to the test environment with vCat, total response time skyrocketed by almost 30 seconds. For web operations and performance analysis teams, this information is critical to ensuring optimal user experience for geographically distributed end users.

Chaudhary concluded, "With the Keynote-Shunra solution, web performance testing goes from a quest for theoretical areas for improvement, to a blinding flash of the obvious. Web performance management efforts are dramatically sped up when engineering and testing teams have instant access to real-world network conditions while still in the lab."

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Keynote Systems, Inc.,  is the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring and testing. Keynote maintains the world's largest on-demand performance monitoring and testing infrastructure for web and mobile sites comprised of over 4,000 measurement computers and mobile devices in over 275 locations around the world that enable companies to continuously improve the online and mobile experience.

Keynote Systems: http://www.keynote.com/