Monday, 29 July 2024
Whether you are planning to implement Aderant for the first time, perform a scheduled upgrade, or migrate to Sierra Cloud, it's crucial to identify in advance any disruptions or bottlenecks that could impact your fee earners' productivity and the smooth operation of your firm. Prolifics Testing work with some of the World’s leading law firms, carrying out in-depth performance testing of business-critical applications, including Aderant Expert and Sierra, to reduce the risk of change and provide the required level of confidence that changes are not going to affect day to day activities.
Challenges Faced by Law Firms
Law firms face specific challenges with their practice management systems:
- High Levels of Transactions: Legal practices usually have large numbers of fee earners and back-office staff to support, with a corresponding high volume of transactions, documents, and data exchanges, which can strain system resources. Coupled with the high volumes, there are often specific busy peak times where activity is at its greatest, which can expose limitations with applications and supporting infrastructure. Effective performance testing ensures that the Aderant Expert system can manage these loads efficiently, maintaining optimal performance at peak times and identifying potential bottlenecks / infrastructure limitations.
- Integration: To maximise the value, all Practice Management Systems have a high level of integration with various systems, especially Office apps, document management and financial applications. These integrations require thorough testing to ensure seamless interoperability. Performance testing in this context verifies that data flows smoothly between systems under load, minimising the risk of integration issues when systems are in production use, which could disrupt operations.
- System Scalability: As law firms grow, their practice management systems must scale to accommodate increased workloads and additional users. Performance testing helps ensure that Aderant Expert can handle growth without compromising performance. This involves testing the system's ability to scale up in response to higher demands and verifying that it maintains efficiency and responsiveness. By addressing scalability, law firms can avoid performance degradation and ensure that their systems support long-term growth and evolving needs.
Addressing Specific Performance Issues
Our clients usually have several key areas of concern when considering performance testing for Practice Management Systems:
- Complex Billing Workflows: The three-step billing process can lead to performance issues due to its complexity and firm specific customisations. Customisations can have unintended side-effects that slow down operations and affect the overall efficiency of billing processes.
- Bulk Pre-bill Generation: Handling multiple matters when invoicing, particularly during bulk pre-bill generation, can cause significant performance bottlenecks, delaying critical billing operations.
- Scalability Challenges: As firms add more seats, licences, and servers, it becomes essential to ensure that Aderant's infrastructure can handle the increased load without performance degradation.
Our Approach to Solving These Issues
Performance testing identifies and addresses potential bottlenecks, ensuring your critical applications can manage the demands of legal practice management. By simulating real-world usage scenarios, performance testing provides assurance of consistent system response times during peak usage, identifies and mitigates performance issues before they affect end-users, and verifies the system's scalability to handle increasing loads. Our services include:
Load and Performance Testing
Our experienced team works closely with law firms to ensure Aderant systems can handle high user loads and peak periods without performance degradation. Using accurate simulations and market leading tooling, we identify bottlenecks and optimise infrastructure to maintain optimal performance.
Stress Testing
Using the scenarios developed for testing normal load, we increase loading and the number of concurrent users to identify the system's limits and ensure recovery from extreme levels of load. This helps law firms prepare for unexpected spikes in usage and ensures system stability under pressure. We commonly test failover scenarios as a part of these tests.
Soak Testing
We assess performance over extended periods to detect issues such as memory leaks and associated response degradation that occur over time. This ensures that the Aderant system remains reliable and efficient during prolonged usage, preventing gradual performance decline and identifying any infrastructure issues.
Our Recent Success Stories
A global law firm needed support to validate infrastructure scaling and configuration for Aderant Expert Billing on-premise. We worked on simulating and resolving issues for a load of 400 concurrent users. Read more >>
Browne Jacobson - Performance testing simulated Aderant Expert stability under load. Normal, peak, and stress tests confirmed system efficacy, handling 500 concurrent logins and time postings with 90% of all response times under the target non-functional requirement. Read more >>
Ready to Ensure Seamless Operations?
Contact Prolifics Testing today to optimise your Aderant systems and safeguard your firm’s productivity. Let us tailor a performance testing approach that meets your specific needs and keeps your operations running smoothly.
Contact us for a no-obligation quotation or just some advice on what might be needed.
Jonathan Binks - Head of Delivery
Prolifics Testing UK
