Language
UNITEC and UVM, which Laureate International Universities administers, faced a need to ensure that their central systems were fast enough to keep operations running without interruptions, therefore maximizing user productivity.
Laureate is an international web of superior education institutions that operates mainly in Mexico and Peru. With more than 25 years of experience, it has approximately 470,000 students in 50 campuses in Latin America. In Mexico, it operates in UVM and UNITEC universities, with 240,000 students across more than 30 campuses.
With approximately 100 digital windows to assist 200,000 students, the main challenge that Laureate faced was the saturation of their windows. This is where the students requested their kardex, schedules, made payments, alongside other processes.
Because of this, there were endless students in line trying to carry out these processes, which made it a slow and tedious process for both students and administrators.
Therefore, the objective of the project was to execute stress tests to simulate all of the users using the system. To see how it would behave in real life and to be ready for utilization peaks, because it was critical that the system would not collapse in busy seasons.
Laureate uses a system called Banner in which students can carry out any administrative process online. This system is built in the Oracle Forms framework, which provided various complications in making this project.
The communication between Oracle Forms and other areas of their organization is complicated because the technology conducts a “streaming” of events and interactions with the Oracle forms in a constant way and not only by sending the operations.
The server needs to know that the client is online and, from there, exchange information in a certain format. To be able to carry out this process, a congruent session and complex regular expressions are needed, which were the main challenge.
Because Oracle’s infrastructure is wide, it is necessary to perform tests to simulate different loads and prove that it can support them. Therefore, before contacting Getecsa, there were several attempts with different tools to simulate multiple concurrent users connected without achieving the expected result.
Utilizando NeoLoad para realizar pruebas de performance, Getecsa fue capaz de simular las conexiones hacia el servidor de Oracle Forms. Por lo tanto fue necesario crear un programa de autocorrelación que permitiera mantener la conexión abierta y al mismo tiempo enviar y recibir las peticiones, permitiendo al final obtener los resultados esperados por Laureate.
"Reduce test cycles from weeks to days, from days to hours. Automatic updates mean it is no longer necessary to rewrite scripts each time the code changes.” – Tricentis about Neoload.
After this project, Laureate was able to incorporate performance tests in central systems before being released to production, which provides security that the infrastructure will be adequate to satisfy the demand, maintaining a good image and productivity for users.
Through our implemented solution, Laureate was able to validate their windows system. Thanks to this, the windows were now more efficient, and wait times faced by the students and operatives were less, which made them save money and time.
Laureate. (2025). https://www.laureate.net/about
● NEOLOAD Load and Stress Testing Software from Tricentis www.neotys.com
Getecsa is a certified partner of Tricentis in Latin America. https://www.neotys.com/partners/getecsa
