Pragmatic Automation

Automation Saves Christmas

Last year, Lands’ End selected its strategic J2EE application server and the word came down from upon high that projects should port to it as quickly as possible. Because life has a sense of humour and I’m often the punchline, it was decided that our project should be the first one to make the transition.

Being a big and expensive application server (no names to protect the guilty), it lives on its own server and mere programmers are not allowed to touch it. This eliminated the easy deploy that we had previously enjoyed. But the spirit of pragmatism will not be deprived! Now our Ant script has a target for building the required EAR file and then we run a second script to use secure copy to move the file to a directory on a designated machine.

For our web application, we had special capacity needs above and beyond the capabilities of the internal toolset. While our public facing website is very well tested, it is done using an external service. This was not an option for our internal web application. Yet, the load it was required to handle was above anything that we could generate with even our whole team rapidly hitting it from our workstations. By using JUnitPerf, I was able to construct a test that simulated anything from 1 to 100 simultaneous users, using HttpUnit to interact with our web application and with each simulated user using unique data.

With the realistic traffic that we generated, we were able to identify and resolve several bottlenecks in our system’s performance. The day was saved. Our system took us through our Christmas peak season with no support calls. And with the tests being scripted, we can re-run them at anytime that we please: after changes to the internal infrastructure, or as we recently did to test that our system would run unaffected by our newest companion system in the J2EE cluster.

If you can’t automate everything, you automate what you can.

I was teaching at Lands’ End earlier this month and got to see Simon’s web application being put to the task during this year’s peak shopping season. At stations on the warehouse floor, amidst a dizzying network of conveyor belts loaded with holiday gifts, an army of workers use the web application to help package and ship orders. It seemed only fitting that delivering the software to these work stations be as automated as delivering the packages to your house. Seeing this well-oiled machine in action, I just kept repeating one word: Wow!