Discount Tire

Focusing on service excellence

As part of its commitment to service excellence, Discount Tire is continually investing in the online and in-store experience. Aditya Kattamuri, Assistant Manager, ITSM Test & Quality Assurance at Discount Tire, elaborates: “Around ten years ago, we embarked on a big project to consolidate the systems that support our in-store point-of-sales (POS) systems. The POS is a crucial customer touchpoint, so it was vital to test the new IT infrastructure thoroughly before we went live.”

To help ensure the smooth rollout of its new POS environment, Discount Tire selected OpenText™ LoadRunner™ Enterprise to test its Windows Sockets (Winsock) APIs.

“At the time, LoadRunner Enterprise was the only solution on the market that could cater to our technical requirements—and even though we’ve evaluated other solutions since, LoadRunner remains the clear leader,” continues Kattamuri. “We continued to use the Micro Focus (now OpenText) solution to load test our POS systems. When the time came to deploy SAP ERP a few years later, LoadRunner Enterprise supported the relevant protocols straight out of the box, allowing us to focus on project delivery.”

Fast forward to the present, and the digital channel is more important than ever for Discount Tire. “We see very high traffic during the Thanksgiving shopping season, which makes a big contribution to overall revenue,” says Kattamuri. “To maximize sales, it’s very important that our e-commerce store is always available.”

Building a resilient e-commerce channel 

Traffic volumes during peak events have been increasing rapidly at Discount Tire. During a Black Friday event a few years ago, performance issues were observed after a sudden surge of visitors.

Deexith Thota, Senior Performance Engineer at Discount Tire, explains: “We immediately mobilized our teams to identify the bottleneck and made sure the performance issues were resolved. Afterwards, we wanted to learn the right lessons and make sure that situation never happens again. We leveraged our LoadRunner Enterprise solution to help solve the challenge.”

LoadRunner Enterprise was the only solution on the market that could cater to our technical requirements—and even though we’ve evaluated other solutions since, LoadRunner Enterprise remains the clear leader.

Discount Tire uses the VuGen component of LoadRunner Enterprise to create performance test scripts, and schedules them to run automatically from Jenkins. By integrating the solution with monitoring and data visualization solutions including JMeter, Gatling, Dynatrace and Grafana, the company can extract finegrained insights to rapidly identify and debug issues at the code level.

“As part of a wider Shift Left initiative, we defined a formal process to help prepare for the demands of the Black Holiday period,” says Thota. “Around August each year, we use LoadRunner Enterprise to test all customerfacing applications and interfaces with three times the number of users we measured during the previous Black Friday period.”

Discount Tire has performed several proofof-concept exercises around integrating LoadRunner Enterprise tests more closely with its CI/CD pipelines and processes, so that developers can gain faster feedback on the quality of their code. This ongoing project to shift performance testing earlier in the development cycle should save time and effort by avoiding the need for developers to wait to test and subsequently rework their code.

“In general terms, we want to test proactively rather than reactively,” says Thota. “The goal is to give developers more immediate information so that we can shorten the delivery cycle.”

Empowering customers to shop 24/7

By stress-testing its core systems well in advance of the Black Friday period, Discount Tire can ensure that customers are able to shop its online deals at any time, all year round. “Last year’s Black Friday promotion was an enormous success for Discount Tire,” comments Thota. “We saw almost two-times higher user traffic compared to the previous season, but our systems remained rock solid helping us to delight our online customers and win incremental sales. We greatly appreciated that Micro Focus (now OpenText) was standing by just in case we needed support during the all-important Black Friday period.”

Last year’s Black Friday promotion was an enormous success for Discount Tire. We saw almost two-times higher user traffic compared to the previous season, but our systems remained rock solid—helping us to delight our online customers and win incremental sales.

Based on more than a decade of success with OpenText (formerly Micro Focus), Discount Tire continues to explore new opportunities to harness tools from the LoadRunner family. The company continues to use LoadRunner Enterprise for testing the majority of its applications, including SAP applications and its e-commerce website, but as Software-asa-Service (SaaS) on the OpenText Cloud. “We moved from an on-premises deployment of LoadRunner Enterprise to the SaaS option, which gives us greater convenience and continual non-disruptive updates in functionality,” says Thota. Discount Tire also uses LoadRunner Cloud for testing selected graphical user interfaces and Web APIs.

“Micro Focus (now OpenText) is always willing to go the extra mile,” says Thota. “For example, while we were upgrading our e-commerce site to a more responsive single-page architecture, we experienced an issue with the Micro Focus (now OpenText) web session recording tool, TruClient. Micro Focus (now OpenText) worked side-by-side with us until the issue was resolved, and deployed a patch especially for Discount Tire, which was later included in all subsequent releases of the solution.”

Kattamuri concludes: “For more than 10 years, we’ve partnered with Micro Focus (now OpenText) for all our application performance testing needs. Micro Focus (now OpenText) has always been there to support us—helping Discount Tire focus on taking care of our customers.”