If you’re a toddler parent living in Oslo and wish to avoid the mommy or daddy track at work, March 1st should have a big red X in your calendar. To have a chance of getting your toddler admitted to kindergarten, you must have your enrollment application sent before this date. This year, which is the first time I’m trying to enroll my daughter, was the first year you could apply through the municipality’s web page. There is a shortage of kindergartens in Oslo, so parents flocked to the online application service only to be greeted with the error message below when sending their applications.
I don’t know any of the developers working for the municipality, but I reckon that they’re not toddler parents. If they had been they would have known that with the lack of kindergartens and the huge number of desperate parents trying to enroll their kids, a kindergarten application service needs proper load testing. The ASP.NET application scaled, but the kindergarten application service shows that a system isn’t more scalable than its weakest link. For the application in question it was the fact that an anti-denial of service filter blocked the service from sending application forms to a mail account.
Later this year Visual Studio Team System turns load testing of web applications into a breeze. Since all tests are mutually the same in Team System, you can use both web tests, unit tests and even manual tests when running load tests. I wouldn’t recommend manual load testing though, and I believe the case of the kindergarten application service goes to show that manual testing isn’t enough. Hopefully, the developers will learn to use these tools so that applying for kindergarten enrollment over the internet will be possible next year. Although I hope that I’ll get my daughter enrolled this year and hence won’t have to verify if the service is able to tackle the load next year.