Performance Testing HCL Commerce with HCL One Test

As more and more business in both the B2B and B2C space is driven through the digital commerce platform, it is imperative that organizations ensure their web sites maintain the performance and reliability required to deliver great customer experiences. To that end performance testing and monitoring should be conducted through tools such as HCL OneTest Performance against the application on a regular basis.

The HCL Commerce application is composed of several software applications and integrations and performance issues can be complex and multifaceted. The hardware resources used to deploy the application is another factor that needs to be considered as well.

Performance tests need to provide meaningful results that can be interpreted by stakeholders. Some relevant and common key performance indicators commonly used for e-Commerce are, to name just a few:

• Order throughput

Orders processed per unit showcases the amount of revenue the solution can handle. The test workload can be increased to see if a greater order throughput is possible without exceeding constraints such as response time and hardware resources.

• Response time

Response time directly impacts customer satisfaction and has an inverse relationship to throughput.

• Page views

The number of page views is an indicator of how popular the website is regardless if it is generating revenue or not.

• CPU utilization, cache hit ratio, and database SQL activities

Some lower level details such as CPU utilization, cache hit ratios and database SQL activities are of interest to architects and developers who need to know what to modify to achieve better performance.

OneTest Performance provides reports which have these details and the reports can also be customized to help problem determination.

Writing OneTest scripts for Commerce requires not only understanding the basic steps of a simple shopping flow, like browsing to a product, adding it to the cart, checking it out and paying for it, but also the other flows that a shopper may go through while browsing on the storefront, like changing their shipping address, adding a new billing address, deleting items from the cart, and so on.

Once the script is written, you can define the volume of transactions to simulate real customer workload and it should be based on normal and peak business activity. This can be done in HCL OneTest by changing the schedule properties and using user groups, random selectors, and other features that will be discussed throughout this article.

There is of course much more to performance testing and how to get the best results using One Test. To dig into the full details and learn how to do the testing right, read our e-guide!

Testing with HCL One Test Performance and HCL Commerce 

by Nourredine Brahimi