Episode

Load Testing a History-Making System

with Ahmed Bahaa

ALM has been the key driver to the success of many software projects. However, have you ever imagined that it can be an effective part of a nation history-making quest?

The Arab Spring swept across Northern Africa and the Middle East in 2011, bringing about dramatic changes in the governing authorities. In Egypt, the revolution changed the regime, and the Military Council took over to restore order, and to call for a fair election where the nation chooses its new president. The election committee was under pressure to facilitate a system that would support transparent and fair elections.

With only a team of 6, including three developers, a limited budget, and about one month to develop the application that scales up to 55 million eligible electors, the team tried to utilize some important ALM practices that were of a great help. The team knew that the choice of the practices and tools would be critical to the success of the project. Testing the load of the system in an accurate and realistic way, and speeding up the development cycle were the name of the game in this critical mission. The team was particularly concerned about how to build for, and to handle, the load those applications that would experience in a very tight time window. Only one shot was there then, and the world was watching.

In this session, Ahmed will talk in more details about that critical load testing mission, which in its turn derived other Agile practices. How was it planned for? How was it implemented using Visual Studio ALM? What were the practices that were of a great help in achieving the goal? and What were the best lessons learned?

But before jumping into the story, we will go through an essential background of load testing