5 steps to test your service

Service testing is key to keeping your customers happy. When you have created a service, your number one goal is to make sure your customers love it. Great features with an intuitive user interface have been set up, but can your service fill the needs of your customers, once they come flocking in? To be sure that it does, you will need to test your service.

 

 

A crashed system is a sure-fire way to deter customers. But you do not need to just wait and pray, it is possible to test the service beforehand to find and fix any issues. At Rugged Tooling, we have built network testing tools for years. We have the tools and the skills to help you.

 

Here’s how service testing works:

1. Let us know your system details

Together, we explore your system. The details of the messaging between the system and the users, authentication methods and different use cases. We need to know your system-specific messages in order to replicate them.

 

2. Setting the goals

Next step is to set the goals for the service testing. If you expect to see about 50 000 users at one time, we might agree to test the system with 100 000 users. You may also want to see how the system behaves if the messaging does not work as expected. We may agree to send some faulty messages in with the good ones.

 

 

3. Creating the test setup

In this phase, we will create test scripts to emulate the users and their interactions with the system. The scripts, once launched, will create the type and amount of traffic that seems as if a great number of your customers are logging in, working their way in the system and interacting with it, just as real users would. The scripts will be loaded to our traffic generation tool Ruge.

 

4. Launching the tests

In this phase, our engineer will take the tool and set it up to the data center, where your service is running. Traffic generator Ruge will be set in the incoming line, to seem as if the traffic is coming from outside, from the actual users. You will be monitoring your service to see what will happen.

Once the simulated users start coming in, you will be able to see whether your system can handle them. Or if not, will the responses be delayed? Or will the system crash, and if does, will it recover smoothly or not?

 

5. Repeat until perfect

When any bad news come up during the testing, the good news is that the simulated customers won’t mind. You will have time to fix any failures and go for another test round until everything works smoothly for sure.