New Team Test Case Studies: Hotmail.com and "March Madness"

What do Hotmail.com and March Madness have to do with each other? Well they both generate HUGE amounts of Web traffic. Hotmail boasts over 260 million customers, and March is known as the busiest month for virtually every sports-related Web site, owed to the millions of people who create and host their March Madness basketball tournament brackets.

Building Web sites which scale to the requirements of each of these Web scenarios obviously poses some unique challenges, not only in the way the site is built, but also in the way the site is tested. I am pleased to announce the availability of two brand new case studies profiling how two teams used the testing capabilities of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers to ensure that their Web properties would be ready to scale to the traffic requirements when they went online. Granted, very few of us ever need to worry about the traffic numbers that these sites do. But the techniques detailed in these papers can be taken and applied to even the most modest of Web sites to help tweak and tune for maximum site performance.

You will need Microsoft Word to view these case studies, or you can download a free Word 2003 viewer from here.

I also want to recognize Keith Kline, Rajeev Shukla, Aaron Burcham, and Eric Lee for all of their contributions to these papers.