Integration of Performance Management into the Application Lifecycle

Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Despite the widespread recognition that performance is important to the success of a project, many software products fail to respond fast enough to user requests or to handle a certain amount of parallel business transactions. This is because nowadays projects are result-oriented where the focus is on functionality to be implemented. Such projects do not pay high attention to application performance because it still does not have the particular importance that unit testing for example has. Moreover today s development models usually consider performance management only in a limited way within their lifecycle and often follow what is known as the fix it later approach. The fix it later approach concentrates on software correctness and defers performance considerations to the integration testing phase where additional hardware is added or a system is tuned when performance issues are detected. The problem of neglecting performance management is that performance issues often do not emerge until an application is put into production, where it is likely to suffer the consequences of a performance failure. The consequences of performance failures can be increased operational costs, increased development and hardware costs, and damaged customer relations. If severe performance issues are discovered during production, it may be too expensive to re-design a system or even impossible to add additional hardware in order to meet performance objectives. Such projects are likely to be canceled and their costs will be unrecoverable. To avoid such situations, performance management should be integrated into an application s lifecycle from the beginning. This means that performance objectives have to be defined early within a project and continually verified as an application evolves. Having performance management integrated from the beginning allows to reduce overall project risk and costs because performance issues can be spotted and corrected early in the lifecycle and even before end users are affected. Furthermore an application is extensively tested for its ability of reaching performance objectives before it is deployed to a production environment and exposed to real users. NovaTec GmbH is a company providing IT-services in the area of consulting, project management, software engineering, application architectures, provisioning, performance management, and process engineering. The competences of NovaTec are logically grouped in [...]