The client creates software for municipals that enables those jurisdictions to enter, update, and track the progress of legal cases, their judgments, and the fines attendant upon these judgments. One of the larger jurisdictions in the area wished to move their legacy system data to a customized system designed by the client. To do this, they needed to understand the performance characteristics of the system under specific data loads and user populations. That is where IBM Rational Performance Tester and RTTS come into play.

1. CASE STUDY
Scalability Testing of
Regional Case Management Systems with
IBM Rational Performance Tester
Background
The client creates software for municipal, city, and county districts
of north-east Texas that enables the courthouses of those
jurisdictions to enter, update, and track the progress of legal
cases, their judgments, and the fines attendant upon these
judgments.
One of the larger jurisdictions (“the assessor”) in the area wished
to move their legacy system data to a customized system
designed by the client. The assessor wished to understand the
performance characteristics of the system under specific data
loads and user populations.
Challenges
How can a service provider company show potential clients that its solution can scale to the case
load (in terms of both database size and projected clerk population) of a large government law
enforcement agency?
RTTS acted as an unbiased third-party to conduct a series of empirical studies to determine the
performance characteristics of the client's custom-built system for law enforcement case
management in order to demonstrate a good fit with the assessor’s legal systems, case data, and
projected needs in terms of both population and case load data.
Industry
Technology
Solution & Services
 Automated Performance Testing
 Scalability Testing
 Software Process Assessment
Tools
 IBM Rational Performance Tester

2. Strategy
After investigating the issues involved, RTTS decided that our standard process and practices for
performance testing would accurately determine the workload necessary to properly exercise the
PLM solution.
Solution
After extensive requirements capture sessions with the assessor and the client and a brief survey of
the system under test, RTTS wrote a test plan. Leveraging the benefits of their partnership with IBM,
the client decided to use IBM Rational Performance Tester (“RPT”), a tool that allows users to
capture business transactions, automate and modify these transactions, create synthetic workloads
based on population size and roles, and measure the effects of these workloads on production-ready
systems.
RTTS worked with the domain subject matter experts to determine the most common actions
performed on the existing system, automate them, and generalize them for broad use across many
user roles. RTTS determined courthouse load based on current statistics and crafted a network
workload to reflect this.
Working with the client, RTTS applied this workload in 54 experiments against up to a 450 virtual
courthouse employees and a database of up to five million legal cases, collecting data to determine
the performance characteristics at the transaction and system level.
Using in-house tools and expertise, RTTS summarized its findings and generated production-level
tables and charts to facilitate discussion between the assessors and the clients. At the assessors’
request, RTTS created a spreadsheet to interpolate the results as far as possible for heavier and
lighter workloads.
During discussions of the data, RTTS acted to help interpret any questions regarding the test and
related data.
Benefits
After investigating the network traffic generated by several transactions, RTTS noted that specific
transactions were transmitting much more data than was required for the needs of the specific

3. transaction, and worked with the client to streamline the protocol traffic for that transaction by
several orders of magnitude.
During the iterative process of adapting and generalizing the automated business transactions for
use across many different kinds of court procedures, legal cases, and payment systems, RTTS
determined that case searches were returning too much data to workstations connected to the
system.
All of these findings were caught during initial studies of the system, allowing the development team
time to pivot and to address these concerns before the performance studies were to be conducted.
Despite the changes in the protocol and the system, RTTS had automated the transactions in such a
way that handling these changes required minor changes of a few minutes, rather than the
beginning of a new performance automation development iteration.
RTTS assisted the client in running several pilot studies on the system to provide feedback to the
database administrators so appropriate optimizations could be made on the database management
systems.
With the quality and speed of the feedback, the systems team was able to resolve a number
of performance and functional issues before release. The end result was that the formal
empirical performance study of the system showed local sub-second responses in all but the
most data-laden high-usage conditions. RTTS provided a detailed study of the performance
characteristics of the client system to the assessor team and the client for discussion.
RTTS is an IBM Premier Partner. Since 1996, RTTS has been an education & consulting partner
with IBM – implementing solutions and providing educational services around IBM’s Rational
Software testing tools. RTTS has worked with the IBM Rational team to deliver top-notch
solutions around their excellent testing software.
For more information about our solutions and services, go to www.rttsweb.com
copyright Real-Time Technology Solutions, Inc. 2014