As I mentioned in previous posts, during the development of the SO-Aware Test Workbench we literally obsessed about making performance testing as simple as it gets. One of the aspects that make performance testing so simple with the SO-Aware Test Workbench is that it leverages SO-Aware’s WCF centralized configuration capabilities.

During our presentations of the product, I’ve seen customers literally be blown away by how easy is to compare the performance impact of specific WCF configurations using the SO-Aware Test Workbench. In real world scenarios, it’s very common for developers to continuously alter the configuration of WCF service without fully testing the performance impact of it until the service gets deployed in a production environment.

The SO-Aware Test Workbench addresses this scenario by abstracting the complexities of the WCF configuration from the test itself. Bottom line, SO-Aware Test Workbench tests drive the configuration directly from SO-Aware making it completely transparent to the tester. When using the SO-Aware Test Workbench, we often find developers and testers collaborating in a way similar to what’s illustrated in the following picture:

Let’s illustrate this flow with a real example.

Suppose that a developer registered a service in SO-Aware configured with the basicHttpBinding as highlighted below.

Initially, our developer will model a functional test against a WCF service using SO-Aware. The following figure illustrates this process.

After that a tester can create a load profile based on the test created above. The following figure illustrates this process using the SO-Aware Test Workbench.

After executing this load profile against our sample WCF service, we will observe the following results. 

Later on the development path, our developer decided to change the configuration of the WCF service to include certain security behavior as illustrated in the following figure.

After the change takes place, our tester can SIMPLY RERUN the load test created previously and compare the results. In this case we can easily confirm that the security configuration applied has had a serious performance impact in the runtime behavior of the service.

Notice that we were able to re-execute the test without the need to modifying the WCF configuration!!

Following this same model, developers and tester can modify the WCF configuration until they obtain an acceptable performance.

What did I learn?

The combination of testing and WCF centralized configuration makes the process of modeling and executing performance tests extremely easy using the SO-Aware Test Workbench. Using this technique, testers can focus on modeling load profiles against WCF services without being concerned by the complexities of the underlying WCF configuration.

As always, you can download SO-Aware and the SO-Aware Test Workbench from our website. Go ahead give them a try and send us some feedback.

• Jesus Rodriguez's blog