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Jul. 4, 2009

Novell says it is now using quality assurance (QA) testing tools from third-party vendor DynaTrace in helping battle the current global recession.

Novell's new QA software products have undergone rigorous inhouse tests before going to market.

However, DynaTrace’s tools are making the testing process easier today than ever, according to Mike Demastrie, engineering manager at Novell.

Two years ago, Novell started using the Development and Test Center editions of PurePath in attempts to raise efficiency around identifying, diagnosing, and resolving application performance issues in Novell’s Linux identity management software.

By using DynaTrace as part of its agile development efforts, the Linux distributor has doubled and even tripled performance test throughput without adding more staff, according to Demastrie.

Additionally, Novell explored several other toolsets around that time, including products from OpNet and Wiley Software Testing. But ultimately Novell settled on DynaTrace since it was the only candidate with all three of the capabilities needed: application performance monitoring debugging, and account profiling.

With the severe decline of the economy since September 2008, these productivity gains have taken on even more importance at Novell.

When early members of Novell’s Quality Assurance team discovered some performance issues, they had to bring the developer directly into the testing process. Back then, Novell’s QA testers and developers used a synchronous approach, in which two people worked together simultaneously on every issue.

The QA tester induced the problem and the developer then fixed it. Both people used the same server during these procedures, with one person sitting idly by and waiting. But this tied up hardware, as well as the time of testers and developers alike. Not a good thing, especially in a recession!

Instead, DynaTrace’s tools can preserve individual transactions for later view, allowing Linux developers to quickly resolve software problems whenever it’s convenient for them, explained Lucy Monahan, QA engineer at Novell.

The tools use DynaTrace's PurePath transaction tracing technology to help assess the "what, where, and why" of a specific kernel problem, either from an end-user perspective, such as poor response time, or a code perspective such as a MySQL database exception.

Monahan finds this asynchronous approach to be particularly helpful in working with identity management specialists, since these expert developers can get very busy, to say the least.

To find the specific root cause of a problem, PurePath uses techniques that include problem documentation, incident "triage" and problem isolation, deep diagnostics in realtime and finally, online problem reconstruction.

The PurePath technology helps to analyze memory, code-level performance, database access, SOA/remote overhead, thread and synchronization and exception/log discovery.

Available in two other different implementations, DynaTrace's tools support both J2EE and Microsoft's .Net development environments as well. The toolsets offer a number of additional capabilities, including runtime modeling, scaleability tuning, and 24-by-7 transaction monitoring and management.

It will be interesting to see if other Linux vendors follow in Novell's footsteps.

Quality assurance and in-depth testing is critical to most enterprise applications, and it is reassuring to watch Novell carefully execute its newly-found initiative.

Source: Novell.

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