Hit Your New OS/400 Apps Hard with a TestBENCH 'Stress Test'

by Alex Woodie

Say you're working on a new OS/400 order lookup program that your biggest customers will be able to access. What happens when it goes live for the first time: does it sink or does it swim? A new release of Original Software's TestBENCH for iSeries application testing suite, announced last week, features a new "stress testing" capability, as well as "date warping" and "results compare," which should take some of the guesswork out of deploying new applications.

TestBENCH for iSeries provides testers and developers with record, playback, and verify capabilities for identifying problems in OS/400 batch, interactive, and service programs, as well as those programs' user interfaces, reports, and data stores. More than 350 organizations around the world use TestBENCH, which has enabled Original Software, of London, England, to grow at a healthy rate and to make further enhancements to its flagship product.

With TestBENCH 4.0, the company is enabling the simulation of 100 or more users working within an interactive application. By registering the response times of individual screens under heavy user loads, the software can help developers to spot problems, such as database issues, before they hurt productivity in the real world. Testers can use the software to release a large number of test scripts at the same time, or stagger them to provide a more realistic test bench, the company says.

"It's important to know how an application is going to work when a lot of users press the 'Enter' key at the same time," says Stuart Bishop, Original's product development manager. "Fixing response time and record lock problems before an application goes into production can preserve an organization's image and reduce losses." The new stress testing capability also dramatically improved the record and playback performance of TestBENCH, Bishop says.

The new "results compare" capability in TestBENCH 4.0 compares the results of multiple tests run by the software, and is handy for establishing a baseline value that will make testing easier and more fruitful in the future.

The final new feature, "date warping," should make it easier to see how applications will react to certain dates, such as the end of the month or the end of the year. This feature, which Original says was requested by several customers, prevents testers from having to change date values in the database.

TestBENCH integrates with several other Original testing products, including TestDRIVE, for PC-based testing of 5250 emulation; TestGUI, for testing of graphical Windows applications; and TestWEB, for testing of browser front ends.

TestBENCH for iSeries Version 4 is available now. Pricing starts at around $20,000. For more information, go to www.origsoft.com.