One student at a time…
Recently, I visited a company that develops and distributes software for Independent School District’s across USA. Their main product, originally developed for challenged kids, centers around dynamic computerized teaching and testing programs. This product proved to be so successful among this population that the company adapted it for other kids as well. Initially the product was designed to work in the classroom, hence a very simple architecture: 1 PC working as a learning manager. This 1 PC managed the progress of individual students, as well as received and captured data back to computers across the LAN. However, because of such a high demand, the company decided to host a solution for multiple customers from a central location, specifically – a Cloud hosted server.
Since the original design was created with only a classroom setting in mind, testing and development only occurred over LAN. But now, with accessibility from different regions, including links from APAC countries to US, consideration of the WAN was critical. This required the need to test their solution in a new environment and see if any problems exist. By analyzing this information, they gain a better understanding of how to fix any problems. With this challenge, the company needed a WAN emulator solution that would allow them to re-create the complex topology of the application served over WAN.
Once tested, they were able to easily reproduce the problems reported to the QA from the field. One issue that was noted – disconnections without the ability to reconnect, was leading to a loss of data and historical progress of the students in the program. One of the key tools is tracking “task lists.” One of the main advantages of the system is the ability to produce these new “task lists” for each student, based on historical data retrieved. The new tasks matched the student’s progress in learning the subjects and fulfilling the tasks.
One other obstacle the company faced dealt with the USD security measures. Since product was originally operating on a LAN environment, the security of outside access was a concern. As a result, certain ports were blocked and the company needed to understand how those ports will be affected from blocks in different directions of the link. Shunra VE WAN Emulator was able to reproduce such conditions by filtering application traffic based on protocol and ports, as well as IP addresses and blocking them in one direction – the problems were reproduced instantly. Now QA no longer has to rely on the reports generated from the field to try and fix the problems “in the dark”… They now have a nice “flash light” to expose those reasons for the problem.
The impact of a broken link or just a simple delay in logging in can significantly impact students, especially the challenged ones. Picture a child struggling to connect to the program, no sounds, no pictures… instead sitting with headphones and seeing on a screen: “Connecting…” An unnerving experience for all of us, and even less for them (IMHO). And what if after working for 20-30 minutes on a progressive task – they have to start over because computer lost all memory of what they were doing until now.
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