System Testing
In a project I have been designing and working on lately, we are almost about to finish system testing and enter UAT (user acceptance testing). Its nice to be able to see something you have designed really start to work as intended, but what I find most interesting right about now is that we are also about to do some performance testing. Its good to see your design doing what it was intended to do, but what can it *really* do when you put the "pedal to the metal"?
Its a big web application and has been designed with microsofts best practices in mind. Its extremely resilient and makes heavy use of remoting.
Side Note: I think remoting is a great technology and much under-rated in the web services hype. For a good remoting link, check out one of the remoting gods at http://www.ingorammer.com/RemotingFAQ/RemotingUseCases.html which goes a long way to explaining the right situations for remoting.
To continue, this app is a web based app and allows entry of home loan application for pocessing, validation, PDF creation and sending to processing centres. The information gathered can be quite huge (20 applicants, 10 real estate assets per applicant, 10 non real estate assets per applicant, multiple incomes per applicant, multiple securites per applicant etc. etc). A lot of this info is separated across different pages but not so much as to make the app too clunky. Some pages can weigh in quite heavily and although it is performing extremely well, its never really been "stressed to the max". I have high hopes for the app and think it will do quite well and I will post the performance figures here when its all done to let you know how it goes.
In terms of application progress, its gone very well, with the help of microsoft best practices. These best practices and pre-scriptive architectures are excellent sources of information for system design with performance, scalability, security and any other architecture buzzwords you can think of. I highly recommend them. Check em out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/. They really do help in all aspects and prevent/avoid a lot of problems from the outset of application design.
I'll let you know how perf testing goes.