Best Practices for Enhanced Application and Transaction Diagnostics: Partnership Offers Developers Guidance for Identifying Trouble Spots in the Application Development Testing and QA Cycle

MELVILLE, N.Y.--Many things can go wrong during the development of an enterprise application, underscoring the importance of using test cycles to detect potential performance defects before moving a release into production. Nastel Technologies, an award-winning application performance management (APM) leader, and Thinksoft Global Services, a leading business assurance and software testing specialist for the financial services industry, encourages developers to equip themselves with four “no fail” items for successful application testing. The following best practices for ISVs enforce consistent guidelines for application, middleware and transaction diagnostics:

• Visibility – Ensure that you have the most detailed visibility into the performance of your applications as possible. Synthetic transactions are not enough. Detailed diagnostics down to the method level are essential – you need to see more than just what is being passed into and out of an application as if it were a “black box”. Instead, ensure you have full visibility of each transaction, its dependencies and the contents of middleware messages. Use diagnostics at each juncture to proactively provide detailed information when an application’s behavior veers from the expected.
• Traceability – Knowing when a metric has been breached is an important first step in optimizing application performance during test cycles. Knowing exactly what caused the problem is more challenging. Traditional testing methodologies treat the symptoms, not the root cause. Make certain that you can trace the message path in its entirety to uncover the precise moment and environment when the problem occurred.
• Reproducibility – The key to any successful testing program is the ability to reproduce an error. It is the confirmation of a problem solved, and guarantees that the same problem will never need to be resolved twice.
• Actionability – Once a problem and its trigger have been identified, and after it has been successfully isolated through replication, developers have all of the tools they need to confidently act on the information and permanently resolve application performance problems.

“User Acceptance Testing is somewhat of a double-edge sword. On one hand, it is critical for ensuring product quality. But on the other it can add significant time to the development cycle if problem solving is completely reactionary,” said Charley Rich, vice president of product management and marketing, Nastel. “As more firms move to a DevOps culture, cooperation in usage of tools across UAT and production is important. At the very least it gets the two teams speaking the same language which means time spent in trying to reproduce a problem that is adequately specified can be reduced. At best it can help the joint teams rapidly identify a problem, reproduce it in test and then develop a resolution. As a best practice, testers can leverage the same diagnostic tool production utilizes in order to rapidly identify, trace, replicate and resolve issues that occur during production.”

“We view the partnership with Nastel as extremely strategic and beneficial to financial services institutions as it brings to the table no fail application testing which is critical in deploying successful technology solutions. The best practices rigor that is prescribed signifies a cultural shift in the development and deployment of commercial software,” says John Kiley, Head of US Region, Thinksoft Global Services.

About Nastel

Nastel Technologies is a premier global provider of application performance management solutions for mission-critical applications from the datacenter to the cloud. Nastel is a privately held company headquartered in New York, with offices in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Mexico, and a network of partners throughout Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. For more information, visit Nastel's website at www.nastel.com. Visit our blog, follow us on twitter, become a fan on Facebook.

About Thinksoft Global

Thinksoft is a pure-play software testing company, listed on the National and Bombay Stock Exchanges (NSE & BSE). Thinksoft specializes in helping Global Financial Sector firms to significantly improve the quality of their applications, software and systems. Through domain focus, structured methodologies, offshore delivery centers and test automation expertise, Thinksoft help clients realize 'business ready software', compress timelines and reduce software product life cycle costs.

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