Friday, 29 November 2024
The Prolifics Testing UK performance team have a lot of experience in testing legal applications, especially Practice Management Systems. This blog is a focus on some of the work we have done on the Aderant Expert and Sierra systems, for 5 leading law firms so far, with more in the pipeline.
At Prolifics Testing, we’ve worked with law firms of all sizes to ensure their Aderant Practice Management Systems—both on-premise and cloud-based—deliver the performance needed to support thousands of fee earners and their clients. Whether it’s Aderant Expert on premise, or the in-cloud Sierra, we collaborate closely with clients’ project and technical teams to simulate real-world scenarios and provide actionable insights. Here’s how we ensure your systems perform seamlessly, no matter the setup.
We've worked with five major law firms on Aderant performance testing projects, four in the last 12 months. Our performance team focus on the user journeys that drive efficiency and productivity. The user journeys we usually test focus on the following areas:
• Billing and Financial Operations: From creating and editing pre-bills to billing reviews, approvals, and accounts payable, we ensure these critical processes run smoothly.
• Time and Matter Management: Logging time on the go, searching for clients or matters, and managing approvals are just a few of the tasks we test to ensure fee earners stay productive.
• Reporting and Insights: Generating WIP summaries, AR ageing reports, and running advanced searches by client or vendor—our testing ensures reporting functions are fast and reliable.
• High-Volume Access: We stress-test mass logins, concurrent user workflows, and approval tasks to validate performance under load.
By focusing on these core areas, we help firms identify and address issues before they impact productivity.
Testing Across Infrastructures: Tailoring Insights to Your Setup
No two law firms operate the same way, and neither do their Aderant environments. We’ve worked across a range of setups, uncovering critical insights:
• Web and Citrix Environments: In one engagement, our testing exposed resource bottlenecks in Citrix farms and database servers, highlighting a need for additional resources to be assigned to a virtual environment.
• Sierra Cloud: For another firm, we identified SQL server contention as a key cause of performance degradation under load. The issues were resolved before the firm was able to go live with confidence.
• Hybrid Azure Configurations: Testing workflows like pre-bill creation and billing approvals highlighted areas for optimisation, ensuring scalable and reliable performance.
Each of these engagements required close collaboration with law firms’ in-house teams to ensure our testing accurately reflected production scenarios. This approach not only validates infrastructure readiness but also ensures our recommendations are practical and actionable.
Why Performance Testing Matters
Legal work demands precision and speed. Aderant systems are the backbone of many law firms’ operations, and performance issues can ripple across the entire organisation. By proactively testing for scalability, resource allocation, and user experience, we help law firms stay ahead of challenges, ensuring their systems are ready to meet future demands.
