Increased Stability and Improved Public Perception
The government department heading up Education in Gauteng launched an online platform for parents which supports the registration of parents, registration of children entering Grades 1 and 8, as well as the application to a selected school.
The aim of the system was to improve efficiencies across the province and ensure that parents no longer have to stand in long queues at the desired school.
The debut launch of the Online Admissions System in 2016 was characterised by several issues, most prevalent of which was its inability to perform optimally or scale with user demand. It was with this background in mind that the government department chose to make use of the performance testing services of the Design and Validation Centre (DAV Centre) at the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) and as the performance testing partners for the DAV centre, the testing was conducted by IT Ecology.
IT Ecology was engaged to do the performance testing of the system in 2017 with less than a month remaining until the latest version launched to the public with the prime objective of ensuring that the system is stable enough to handle the load from the previous year and more.
Using Eggplant Performance for performance testing and Dynatrace for deep monitoring, iterative performance tests were run, during which code, network, operational, database and infrastructure changes were made until the system could ultimately successfully handle the expected load. With IT Ecology’s consulting and performance testing services playing the majority role in this exercise, the number of full school applications completed in an hour increased by 285% and the system was able to function at a higher-than-maximum expected load consistently for 8 hours.
Following the success of the performance testing exercise, IT Ecology have been engaged for each following year to ensure the stability of the system ahead of the admissions season.
