Case Study: Ikon

Ikon Ensures Software Performance with AQTime.

About Ikon

Ikon Corp was created in 2001 with the goal of becoming a leading technological partner for Italian police, judicial authorities and corporate security, providing innovative, unconventional support for “info-investigative” activities. The company’s workforce is composed of professionals from different yet complementary areas of expertise: governmental investigations; information security; company security management; and criminology. Ikon Corp has at its disposal an R&D structure for the delivery of a “turn-key”software project to the client, from initial analysis, to development and startup of the project.

Ikon Corp’s A.D.M.I.N. is an integrated hardware and software solution that monitors networks and detects, analyzes and identifies threats and illegal or damaging activity and pinpoints their origin in real time. To ensure stellar performance and identify performance issues and memory leaks quickly and accurately, Ikon selected AQtime from SmartBear for its ability to profile code, spot leaks and verify that tests had covered all of A.D.M.I.N.’s code.

Problem

Ikon Corp uses AQtime to identify performance issues and memory leaks reliably and accurately. Recently, they shared details about how AQtime helps them with their test strategy.

A.D.M.I.N. (Auditing, Detection and Monitoring of Information Networks) is Ikon Corp's integrated hardware and software solution that monitors a partial or complete network. "ADMIN can detect, analyze and identify threats and illegal or damaging activity and pinpoint their origin in real time," said Luigi Sandon from Ikon Corp.

Reliability Needed

Ikon needed to make sure A.D.M.I.N. was solid and ready to ship. "While developing A.D.M.I.N., we needed to make it very robust and reliable. Its monitoring modules need to run 24x7, almost unattended, often in remote locations. We knew we had to identify any performance issue and memory leaks quickly and accurately," said Luigi.

"Furthermore, due to the increasing availability of bandwidth, we needed to make it as fast as possible too, to allow for a prompt response whenever a threat has been identified. I knew that these goals could not be achieved with the debugging toolset included in Delphi and C++ Builder, or with empirical test. We needed a tool to profile code, spot leaks and verify that tests had covered all of our code."

Choosing AQtime

"Being a Delphi developer, I was already aware of AQtime. Before asking to buy it, I researched other competitors’ tools. AQtime was our choice because it supports a useful set of profilers, a broad range of compilers, both Win32 and .NET, allowing us to use what technology best suits our needs, using a single tool now and in the foreseeable future. Its interface is well designed and easy to use, reports are comprehensive, and the only time I found an issue with the product, support was very responsive. Not to mention the many updates released between major releases help to add new functionality," said Luigi.

Test Strategy

AQtime is a key part of Ikon Corp's test strategy. "Some unit test runs are performed while profiling the application to spot leaks and performance issues. Coverage analysis is performed to validate the tests. Before a release, a platform compliance test is run," said Luigi.

AQtime Pinpoints a Nasty Problem

Luigi told us about a hard to debug problem with a third-party library: "Once we ran into a very nasty problem within a third-party library that we use to access Oracle databases. Debugging within Delphi didn’t help, and we had no clue where the issue was coming from. Our release date was closing nearer and nearer. I used the AQtime exception trace profiler to pinpoint the problematic code. Then we were able to develop a workaround and send the information to the vendor to fix it."

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