The finance department forecast that by 2004 in excess of a quarter of a million internet sales would be generated by some twelve million user sessions. ITG, responsible for assessing the performance of the delivered system against agreed service levels, accordingly prepared and presented "an approach to achieving confidence in operational performance" to all 50 members of the development team (September 2000). The approach defined an audit trail from the agreed business sales forecast to the various models (e.g. stress, peak load) required to emulate concurrent workload characteristics.

Emulation models were built using Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner tool. To achieve this it was necessary to rationalise the functional architecture and develop LoadRunner (HTTP/HTML) scripts configured with both default and additional performance monitors (Netscape, Websphere, Oracle Server and Network Delay). The resulting 'End User Experience' and resource utilisation, for the early trial releases of the personal finance application, were examined under varying load profiles, using LoadRunner's powerful performance analysis suite.

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