San Diego Community College District Uses TimeShiftX® for Educational Testing

Business Needs

Mission-critical date logic required comprehensive testing

SDCCD manages almost one hundred thousand students annually and offers various educational programs, degrees, and certificates. To run the district SDCCD leverages educational modules however to improve performance and reliability they deployed their application on a new high-performance shared infrastructure.

When the district accepts new students, their system allows for the management of all educational processes such as:

• Financial Aid
• Student Communication
• Admission Dates
• Class Scheduling
• Billing
• Registration
• Campaigns
• Expiration Dates
• Installment Payments
• Accrued Interest

The Challenge

Clock changes met Active Directory & operational roadblocks

With multiple departments sharing the high-performance server environment, clock isolation was essential:

• Shared server environment prevented traditional OS clock adjustments for testing
• Changing system clocks would disrupt non-test workloads across other departments
• Purchasing dedicated hardware for testing would incur heavy capital expense and violate IT architecture
• Critical enrollment and financial aid modules required extensive future-date simulation

Because of the strict environment policies, the SDCCD team needed a time travel solution that would ensure the reliability and uptime of the environment. By leveraging TimeShiftX, the team was able to time travel easily without worrying about system reliability or adding further complexities.

The TimeShiftX Solution

Virtual time simulation without altering host operating clocks

With the migration to a new infrastructure, the SDCCD QA team needed a solution that would integrate and not conflict with other testing teams. After review, SDCCD concluded TimeShiftX was the best software to meet their functional and sensitive environment needs.

In the environment, educational modules required extensive testing to ensure the financial cases, enrollment lifecycles, and workflows properly functioned. However, the architecture of secured servers shared company-wide, provided a challenge for SDCCD.

TimeShiftX overcame all obstacles by providing it’s unique “virtual clocks”, which enable safe time travel by leaving the underlying system untouched, thus preserving server stability. In conjunction, TimeShiftX provided targeted time travel which allowed SDCCD to isolate time travel to only one team's specific application stack.

Documented Benefits

What changed for development, QA, and operational timelines

Documented results achieved by SDCCD:

• Instantly time traveled educational modules without interfering with other teams’ applications or settings
• Avoided the capital expense of purchasing dedicated testing hardware
• Isolated time travel strictly to exact application and database instances under test
• Plug-and-play rollout without custom application configuration or administrative friction
• Maintained 100% root system uptime and reliability on high-performance shared infrastructure

By using TimeShiftX, the team was able to isolate time travel to only the exact application and database instances. This prevented any conflicts and allowed multiple teams to perform time travel and non-time travel tasks concurrently on the shared high-performance infrastructure.