Capco Institute Blog

An earlier blog post and related white paper introduced the need for performance engineering, discussed common challenges that IT organizations face, and examined best practices that can be adopted to overcome these challenges.

This blog discusses the end-to-end process of performance engineering and introduces the concept of a performance engineering center of excellence.

Typically, the software development life cycle (SDLC) in most IT organizations is entirely focused on delivering fully functional application software on time and within budget. Application performance is often ignored or evaluated as part of user acceptance testing. But that may be too late for most applications to meet current day’s performance requirements and keep up with future expectations.

Application performance should be carefully considered during requirements gathering, application architecture, design, implementation and deployment. Otherwise, organizations can end up with an application that has undefined performance requirements or an architecture that is functionally superior but will not perform well or cannot easily adopt to changing performance demands.

The best way to adopt performance engineering is alongside each phase of SDLC and to fully integrate with it. Based on that principle, the end-to-end performance engineering process can be divided into the following five phases:

• Planning – Defines the scope, plans deliverables, secures budget and team
• Requirements – Captures well-defined, prioritized and measurable performance requirements
• Design – Ensures that the application architecture and design can meet performance requirements
• Testing – Tests the application under various load scenarios and captures stats
• Deployment – Involves capacity planning, hardware sizing and performance monitoring

While adopting this approach to performance engineering is the most effective and usually produces the best results, it can be expensive and time consuming. Many of these costs can be minimized, along with reducing the time required to execute, by implementing an enterprise-wide performance engineering center of excellence (COE).
A performance engineering COE’s sole purpose is to make the discipline of performance engineering more affordable, available and effective across the organization. The COE’s responsibilities can include:

• Create easy-to-use templates to capture performance requirements
• Collect and maintain a set of proven architectures and design methodologies that can be adopted to meet performance requirements
• Own and maintain an isolated performance testing environment that can be shared by various application teams
• Develop and maintain various performance testing tools, capacity planning models and other commonly used tools and techniques

Download a Integrating performance engineering with software development life cycle white paper that explores these ideas in more detail.

What is your approach to performance engineering in your organization? Join the discussion.