Hosted testing services market growing

Web performance testing through a hosted model can be a cheaper and more effective alternative to performing the function in-house.

As a result, hosted testing services are gaining popularity. According to US-based research house Newport Group, the market for load-testing tools and services reached $214 million last year, an increase of 55 percent over 1998.

To meet this growing demand, Compuware Corporation recently launched PointForward, a remotely hosted Web testing service. Compuware, a $2.2 billion vendor of information technology productivity software and services, will manage the hosted software itself.

"Load testing via the Internet is a faster and cheaper alternative to setting up a test lab, purchasing the hardware and hiring personnel," says Nomaswazi Nkosi, national support manager at Compuware Southern Africa.

PointForward is likely to save organisations money and cut time out of the testing cycle. "By simulating multiple users logging on to a corporations` web site, Compuware measures how much traffic the site can handle and checks for bottlenecks," she says.

"Because Web testing is an expertise that most organisations need periodically rather than all the time, it`s a good alternative that companies can rent rather than buy," says Nkosi. Difficulty in finding people who have Web site testing expertise is another reason why hosted Web testing is gaining popularity, according to Richard Heiman, an analyst at International Data Corporation.

The skills for this kind of work include understanding how an application performs after an unexpected surge in traffic, he says.

PointForward is comprised of four services: reliability testing, which validates the functionality of a Web site or Web-based application; integrity testing, which finds broken links, slow pages and other problems; scalability testing, which tests the site under a simulated load; and ongoing performance monitoring.