Inspired Testing Delivery Manager Liam Stewart and Principal Consultant Rishen Moodley
Inspired Testing, a Dynamic Technologies group company, understands the importance of tailored, effective and vigorous performance testing. Efficient programmes mean less wasted time, allowing critical workers to devote more time to their actual jobs. This benefits the community at large and can have a significant impact on the quality and efficiency of services offered and the management of essential infrastructure. This is where performance testing plays a crucial role, ensuring that these systems not only function but perform optimally under real-world conditions.
When systems perform efficiently, users experience minimal delays, meaning less idle time and more productive hours spent on critical tasks. Furthermore, performance testing guarantees that applications can handle peak loads, preventing costly outages that could disrupt essential services. Systems, apps and programmes that manage critical infrastructure, or those that are used by the police force, emergency services and healthcare providers, must run the way they are designed to function, without glitches, bugs or unplanned downtime. The consequences of not robustly performance testing these products can be anything from disruptive to catastrophic.
UK police force
A recent Inspired Testing partnership with one of the UK’s major law enforcement agencies resulted in improved operational efficiency, enhanced public safety, increased productivity, cost savings and better reputation management. Undergoing a digital transformation, this large police force needed an agile, effective solution that could grow and adapt with them. It needed to support a host of adjacent functions from investigation management and intelligence gathering to police records and prosecutions.
Liam Stewart, Delivery Manager at Inspired Testing, says, “The programme our engineer worked on has had a positive impact on the daily operations of thousands of police officers. They now have an integrated solution that means less time accessing multiple applications.” He adds, “The improved response times associated with activities such as vehicle checks and people searches have improved the effectiveness of the police and thereby provided an improved service to the public. With less time spent on admin, officers are able to spend more time helping to make the streets of London a safer place.”
Stewart says, “Beyond functionality, our performance testing efforts ensured that system response times remained consistently low, even under high demand. This was critical in scenarios such as vehicle checks and suspect lookups, where delays of even a few seconds could compromise public safety. By stress-testing the system against projected peak loads, we helped prevent slowdowns and crashes, ensuring uninterrupted service to officers in the field. By maintaining fast and reliable access to critical data, officers can act swiftly, improving response times and operational effectiveness.”
Yorkshire Water
Yorkshire Water serves 5.5 million customers and employs about 5,000 people. Operating within a heavily regulated environment, it manages critical water and waste systems, ensuring the delivery of safe, reliable services across Yorkshire. When Yorkshire Water’s Head of Technology joined the business, there was no Quality Assurance (QA) or Test practices; testing was essentially undertaken by the development teams. Project delivery performance was poor with a culture of late delivery and a fair proportion of quality issues (although that was hard to quantify).
Yorkshire Water reached out to Inspired Testing who deployed a core team of functional and non-functional QA consultants supported by a fully flexible, experienced team to deal with peaks and troughs in demand. After implementing various solutions, Yorkshire Water experienced an 86% reduction in downtime, a R23 million (£1 million) annual cost saving, improved defect leakage rates and faster regression testing.
Yorkshire Water’s Head of Technology noted, “We have seen a leap in performance over the last few years since we began measuring the quality of deliveries, time, cost and quality. The team continues to innovate through automation and, more recently, the targeted use of AI within their operating model to good effect. Having worked across numerous organisations in my tenure as Head of an IT Department, this testing practice is better than any other I’ve been associated with.”
Rishen Moodley, Principal Consultant at Inspired Testing, says, “In addition to improving overall quality, performance testing played a key role in ensuring Yorkshire Water’s ability to simulate real-world usage conditions and proactively identify bottlenecks. For Yorkshire Water, our approach ensured that critical systems could scale to meet peak demand, preventing failures that could impact essential water and waste management services to households. Additionally, optimising system performance meant employees spent less time waiting for applications to load and more time focusing on service delivery, ultimately benefiting millions of consumers. “
It’s clear that performance testing goes beyond user experience. Reliable and fit-for-purpose systems are an undeniable benefit of effective performance testing, but when lives depend on those systems, performance testing can become a matter of life or death. Ensuring systems can withstand high traffic loads, maintain rapid response times, and prevent service interruptions is not just an IT concern – it is a fundamental requirement for organisations providing critical services.
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