Why Performance Engineering? Why Performance Engineers?

Sep 1, 2014

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Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering: Process, Performance Modeling, Requirements, Testing, Scalability, and Practice

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1.4 Business and Process Aspects of Performance Engineering

Ensuring the performance of a system entails initial and ongoing investment. The investment is amply rewarded by reductions in business risk, increased system stability, and system scalability. Because performance is often the single biggest risk to the success of a project [Bass2007], reducing this risk will make a major contribution to reducing the total risk to the project overall.

The initial performance engineering investments in a software project include

Ensuring that there is performance engineering expertise on the project, perhaps including an individual designated as the lead performance engineer
Drafting performance requirements
Planning lab time for performance measurement and performance testing
Acquiring and preparing performance measurement tools, load generation tools, and analysis and reporting tools to simplify the presentation and tracking of the results of the performance tests

Incorporating sound performance engineering practices into every aspect of the software development cycle can considerably reduce the performance risk inherent in the development of a large, complicated system. The performance process should be harmonized with the requirements, architectural, development, and testing phases of the development lifecycle. In addition to the steps just described, the performance engineering effort should include

A review of the system architecture from the standpoints of performance, reliability, and scalability
An evaluation of performance characteristics of the technologies proposed in the architecture specification, including quick performance testing of any proposed platforms [MBH2005]
Incremental performance testing following incremental functional testing of the system, followed by suggestions for architectural and design revisions as needed
Retesting to overcome the issues revealed and remedied as a result of the previous step

Performance engineering methods can also be used to manage cost-effective system growth and added functionality. For an existing system, growth is managed by building a baseline model based on measurements of resource usage and query or other work unit rates taken at runtime. The baseline model is combined with projected traffic rates to determine resource requirements using mathematical models and other methods drawn from the field of operations research [LZGS1984, Kleinrock1975, Kleinrock1976, MenasceAlmeida2000].

We now turn to a discussion of the various disciplines and techniques a performance engineer can use to perform his or her craft.

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