Common Issues Time Shift Testing Can Help Uncover

We can all admit it – business is a time sensitive endeavor. Whether you are a business-to-consumer or a business-to-business enterprise, time of day, day of week, month of year and year of century can all make an impact on our business.

Whether you are producing quarterly reports, holding a sweepstakes, having a special sale that ends at a certain or day, or you have a deadline for people to pay their invoices – we all have some time sensitivity in our applications, software and other infrastructure. So it makes sense to conduct time shift testing on all of your software to make sure it works under varying circumstances.

It is important to test your software in these time sensitive environments to make sure it performs like it should no matter what time of day, week, month, quarter or year. There are three common issues that can be found when using time shift testing software such as a Time Machine from Solution-Soft:

Time changes. Whether it’s adjusting for Daylight Savings Time or working with Greenwich Mean Time or the International Date Line, it is important to understand how your software will work if it is used in varying locations around the country, continent or world.

Heavy/light load periods. While your office may be open and closed at certain times of day, your customers or vendors (or even the CEO!) may access your software at literally any time. Load testing can check this in a static situation, but what if you have heavy use for a sustained period, like several hours before a sale ends or before a sweepstakes closes? And what about middle of the night, when there may be customers in Asia accessing your software? Can the software work well for people in that region of the world?

Time stamping. In some verticals – such as healthcare and financial services – having an accurate timestamp for the end-user is vitally important for regulatory compliance issues. It is one thing to have the software work right at the right time; it is another to make sure the correct timestamp that is needed is posted.

To some extent, virtually every business software application has a level of time and date sensitivity to it. In that case, time shift testing is a must do for any software development or installation you may undergo. And Time Machine can help you conduct these tests quickly and easily in a very cost effective way so your business can provide excellent customer service all the time, and it will save money in testing and development – with savings passed on to the customers!