Oracle Transportation Management Application Testing

Whether you are a shipper or a third party logistics provider, your transportation management software is at the heart of your business. You rely on it to track and manage every part of the shipping process. If it performs poorly, that has a direct impact on your bottom. Before going live with it, you should do everything in your power to prevent those performance issues from occurring.

This in a nutshell is why load testing is so important. Load testing allows you to test for performance issues in a safe environment. It does this by simulating the effects of multiple users accessing the software at the same time.

Of course, there is a right way and a wrong way to load test Oracle Transportation Management. If you do it wrong, then you will find yourself facing high costs and little useful data to show for the expense. On the other hand, if you do it right you can sail through these challenges and get the data that you want without breaking the bank in the process.

This article discusses how to load test right, get the results that you want, and save on money and time.

Preparation

The single most important decision that you will make is the load testing application that you select. Selecting the right load testing application practically guarantees load testing success. On the other hand, selecting the right load testing application will present you with all sorts of challenges.

So what kind of load tester should you invest in? For Oracle Transportation Management, the most important features in a load tester are protocol independence, ease of use, end user testing and quality reporting. Selecting a load tester with these four features will give you a tremendous amount of power while still maintaining affordability.

Once you have the right load tester, then you need to actually go about preparing for the load tests themselves. You should come up with estimates for the amount of usage the software will be under during normal conditions. In addition, you should come up with estimates for when it will be under higher than normal levels of usage.

For example, if you ship toys, your software will probably be under more stress in December than it is in March.

You can get a pretty good idea of what kind of stress it will be under by looking at your current system and using that as a reference. With load tests, it is better to test too much stress than it is too little.

Set Up

Depending on your load tester, the set up process will be different. For the best load testers, setting up a load test is just a matter of telling the load tester what to stress and how much stress to put it under. For more complex, but by no means more powerful, load testers, you may need to do complex coding and pay a fortune in consulting.

Again, this is where the quality of your load tester and your estimates really makes themselves known. The better you prepared, the easier it will be to set up your load tests properly.

Another thing to note here is that you are going to want to set up and execute multiple load tests. In general, load testing solely on normal levels of stress will not cut it. You want to test for both normal levels of stress and higher than expected levels of stress. That way you can launch the software with the greatest amount of confidence.

Execution and Application

Executing multiple load tests should give you an idea of how the software will perform under different levels of stress. If the reporting of the load tester is good, you should be able to clearly see where the bottlenecks in the software’s performance were.

You can then coordinate with the developers and IT team in order to fix those poor performance issues.

If there are no bottlenecks, then you can put the software in a live environment with confidence.

As you can see, the load tester that you choose has the greatest impact over the success of your load testing efforts. One Oracle Transportation Management load testing application that works really well is AppLoader.

AppLoader has all the important features discussed earlier in this article: it is protocol independent, tests from the end user’s point of view, is easy to use and gives quality data reporting. It helps keep load testing affordable, timely and effective.

With the help of a good load testing application like AppLoader, you can ensure the performance integrity of the Oracle Transportation Management software. This means that you can take full advantage of its features to track and manage shipments, which ultimately helps you maintain a healthy bottom line!