Performance testing provider of the year — Neotys

Load testing, the process of checking that an app or a platform can cope with heavy use, can be a significant bottleneck in the development process. NeoLoad, the core product offering from Neotys, the French performance testing tool developer, brings automation to the challenge. It has been one of the major IT transformation projects in the European banking industry over recent years. Crédit Agricole, the French bank that comprises 39 regional mutual and cooperative banks, has been creating a single online banking platform. Work is still in progress, and the new platform — which involves merging five regional data centres into one — will first be rolled out to around 100,000 employee workstations before finally going live with the network’s 21 million individual customers. The build involves a shift by Crédit Agricole to Agile development methodologies. And it has also entailed important decisions about external technology vendors. One key decision on performance testing was made back in 2014 when it had become clear that progress at the start of the larger project had been slowed by requirements for load testing that proved too challenging for Crédit Agricole’s former external provider. The bank switched to NeoLoad, the test tool offered by Neotys. It now reports that load testing runs six times faster. “We went from being the bottleneck in the software development process to being a trusted partner,” said Pascal Auger, technical and performance approval manager at Crédit Agricole Technologies & Services, the IT services arm of the bank. Sylvain Fambon, vice president of sales for EMEA and Asia at Neotys, says Crédit Agricole’s success at lowering its load testing times is down to NeoLoad’s ability to quickly generate test cases: “With our tool you do not have to start from scratch every time. Credit Agricole was able to refit its existing test cases to launch load tests whenever a new release was ready. It was this ability to automate the redesign of test scenarios that reduced test time drastically.” The 2014 version of the unified platform struggled to deal with 400 virtual internal bank users, said Auger. Now, with the help of Neoload, it can handle 3,000 virtual users with barely any effect on latency. Crédit Agricole Technologies & Services has been able to create a loop of improvement by incorporating the results of faster load testing into the development process, and the new Agile model for continuous delivery supports that with a combination of two or three major annual releases with smaller releases scheduled every three weeks. In total, that means several hundred schedules for load testing and, prior to the Neotys solution, the bank’s quality assurance team was having trouble keeping up. “Load testing can take a lot of time and be quite complex. It is not just about throwing loads at a system,” said Crédit Agricole Technologies & Services’s Pascal Auger. “You have to replicate user behaviour and you have to use data sets that make sense. That’s why it takes time.”