Testing is Rocket Science Not Brain Surgery

LR-Citrix_Presentation

You need to understand that any project requiring a performance test of an application deployment via Citrix is not going to be your casual record and playback affair. So begin by digging up your old C reference manuals, actually they should be close by at all times when working with this tool, but for the neophyte a good reference is a must. Next get a lay of the land for what you can monitor over the network and what key Citrix performance counters you need. Then start to steel yourself for the onslaught of maintenance, you’re going to be using snapshots of defined screen areas to validate whether something has loaded on the screen or finished. What this means is any GUI changes or minor differences in the way the GUI renders (something that happens even when there are no screen changes, go figure) will require at least another run through of all your scripts and making the necessary bitmap hash code updates. LoadRunner provides these for you; it’s just a labor-intensive affair. Factor in that each load injector may render a little differently and you have the potential for a lot of debug pass throughs.

My colleague and friend Chetan Rahul of Fusion Alliance based in Indianapolis was nice enough to take me up on putting together a PowerPoint outlining some of the issues and lessons learned when we began our LoadRunner Citrix engagement. Enjoy!

NOTE: HP has provided some enhancements through a runtime setting that allows for the tool to accept some differential in what is rendered versus the snapshot originally taken, unfortunately despite patch 9.52 I’m still not seeing any benefit from changing the image tolerance.