Case Study

San Diego Community College District Uses TimeShiftX^® for Educational Testing

The San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) was deploying an educational software system for the district. SDCCD used TimeShiftX to test critical software functionality such as student enrollment, billing, and registration workflows. TimeShiftX enabled SDCCD to extensively test their application and to time travel within their shared environment safely without impacting other teams.

Business Needs

SDCCD manages almost one hundred thousand students annually and offers various educational programs, degrees, and certificates. To run the district SDCCD leverages educational modules however to improve performance and reliability they deployed their application on a new high-performance shared infrastructure.

When the district accepts new students, their system allows for the management of all educational processes such as

Financial Aid Student Communication Admission Dates Class Scheduling Billing

Registration Campaigns Expiration Dates Installment Payments Accrued Interest

With the expanded processing power and utility of the new infrastructure, the SDCCD teams shared the servers amongst varying departments. Because of this, SDCCD needed a solution that allowed safe time travel for only the testing team while not impacting other teams sharing the server and while preserving system stability.

Solution

With the migration to a new infrastructure, the SDCCD QA team needed a solution that would integrate and not conflict with other testing teams. After review, SDCCD concluded TimeShiftX was the best software to meet their functional and sensitive environment needs.

In the environment, educational modules required extensive testing to ensure the financial cases, enrollment lifecycles, and workflows properly functioned. However, the architecture of secured servers shared company-wide, provided a challenge for SDCCD.

TimeShiftX overcame all obstacles by providing it’s unique “virtual clocks”, which enable safe time travel by leaving the underlying system untouched, thus preserving server stability. In conjunction, TimeShiftX provided targeted time travel which allowed SDCCD to isolate time travel to only one teams specific application stack.

Benefit

By using TimeShiftX, SDCCD was able to instantly time travel their educational solution without interfering with other team’s applications and environment settings. This added functionality allowed for complete end-to-end testing of all educational modules and workflows.

With TimeShiftX, the testing team did not have to incur the cost of purchasing new dedicated hardware for the team and thus go against their I.T. architecture. By implementing TimeShiftX, the team was able to utilize their current environment and architecture without any issues.

Integrated Time Travel Quickly

TimeShiftX is an easy & quick deployment throughout any environment. This allowed the testing team to focus on validation and verification. And TimeShiftX time travel is essentially plug-in-play, there is no custom configuration needed from an app stack. This allowed application and database admins to be free of involvement and enabled the testing team uninhibited control of their time travel.

Provided Targeted Time Travel

With all departments and team’s sharing servers, it was key for time travel to not impact other team’s applications while the testing team ran validations and testing scenarios.

By using TimeShiftX, the team was able to isolate time travel to only the exact application and database instances. This prevented any conflicts and allowed multiple teams to perform time travel and non-time travel tasks concurrently.

Maintained System Reliability

Per upper management’s decision, the entire infrastructure was switched to new high-performance servers that allowed for consolidation of applications, environments, and databases into these exclusive servers. However, this increased the requirement for system stability and reliability as any downtime will impact the district’s bottom line.

Because of the strict environment policies, the SDCCD team needed a time travel solution that would ensure the reliability and uptime of the environment. By leveraging TimeShiftX, the team was able to time travel easily without worrying about system reliability or adding further complexities. The reason is that TimeShiftX utilizes “virtual clocks” which only applies to the user application space while maintaining root system reliability. This allowed SDCCD to test without worry.