As an automated testing suite, Borland SilkPerformer boasts a broad range of features that are designed to minimize time to market and testing costs. SilkPerformer is engineered to work with a variety of environments, including web services, Java, .NET, COM, and many others.
As applications have become more complicated, the need for realistic testing capabilities has grown tremendously. The days when a handful of developers could test an application themselves are long gone. To adequately test an application under a realistic load requires the automation provided with a utility like Borland SilkPerformer.
Borland SilkPerformer is an effective testing solution that minimizes hardware demands. The SilkPerformer TrueScale technology allows the software to simulate thousands of concurrent users on a single machine.
TrueScale allows a testing engineer to perform broader testing with less hardware. Many testing solutions rely on the creation of separate threads for each virtual user, thereby severely limiting the size of the test group. With TrueScale, SilkPerformer has been engineered to maximize testing potential with limited hardware resources.
When the hardware resources of a single machine do not suffice, SilkPerformer provides a sharable deployment model. Under the Borland license, users can perform tests from multiple machines without having to purchase more than one license. Running SilkPerformer’s TrueScale technology from several machines, engineers can potentially simulate tens of thousands of users. In addition to the quantity of the test users, Borland TrueModem software ensures that each test user behaves in a realistic fashion.
TrueModem achieves realistic user behavior by varying connection speeds, operating environments, and fault tolerances. Test engineers can easily control the behavior of virtual users via the Benchmark Description Language. BDL allows software engineers to create reproducible tests that can be run repeatedly, and at any time. When a realistic test case is needed on short notice, the integrated workload wizard can generate realistic test loads without the need for a single line of code.
Results are accessed via the SilkCentral Test Manager. The Test Manager visually represents the results of a load test, making bottlenecks easy to recognize. With the Test Manager, software engineers can pinpoint individual problems and identify them down to the very line of J2EE or .NET code.
When hardware resources are limited, SilkPerformer can produce realistic test cases. A host machine can run SilkPerformer with as little as 512 MB RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, producing thousands of virtual users. With such flexibility, SilkPerformer is a logical solution for engineers that need to produce large test scenarios with limited resources.