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Performance Engineering

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Performance Engineering
On the web, you have less than 27 seconds to display, communicate and
capture the attention of your customer before they go elsewhere
(Nielson, 2006). Subtract from this the time required to read and
understand your content and it is clear that your solution must perform
well to tap into the business potential of the nearly one billion online
users on the net today.
Solving performance issues by adding faster or additional hardware is
costly, difficult to manage and, unless your solution is designed to scale,
rarely solves the problem.
Engineering, Not Performance Tuning
Tuning is an afterthought; Performance Engineering is planned. It begins with your business goals, your customer
needs and extends throughout the development and support lifecycle. The cornerstone for success involves
carefully defined Service Level Agreements (SLA) and effective management strategies such as DMAIC and
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to set measurable performance objectives and identify issues before
they occur:
Concept Phase
Practice: Critical business processes are identified based on revenue value, cost savings or other business
value.
Benefit: Engineering efforts are prioritized and focused on scenarios that will reduce risk (financial
transactions) and increase revenue (check out process).
Analysis Phase
Practice: Insure that that all non-functional requirements have been captured and are defined in measurable
and quantifiable terms.
Benefit: Anticipated system load and performance characteristics can be modeled early to identify and reduce
implementation risk and costs.
Design Phase
Practice: Create and validate test strategy and plan for critical performance scenarios and generate appropriate
volume of test data (use 10x Engineering).
Benefit: The testing phase is too late to detect critical performance issues. To reduce risk, a performance test
plan must be in place at least mid-way through design.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

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Development Phases
Practice: Employ 10x Engineering to insulate system against unanticipated spikes or steady increases in
production usage or data volumes. Profile all critical scenarios for memory, processors and other resource
utilization.
Benefit: Good engineers design for peak usage not average usage. Further, as business increases so do the
demands on a system. By engineering for sudden spikes (IPO traffic for example) and increased usage over
time, we are engineering reliability and increased life expectancy into your systems.
Testing Phase
Practice: Exercise performance tests using real-world data volumes and bandwidth conditions.
Benefit: Increased confidence validated by load and stress testing based on SLAs defined early in the
process.
Testing Phase
Practice: Use Synthetic Transactions to monitor system health from an end users perspective.
Benefit: Ability to detect and respond to performance issues before your end users. Ability to respond to a
range of issues outside of your system boundary (network latency for example).
Winning the Race Preparation and Training Pay Off
By taking a proactive approach to Performance Engineering throughout the lifecycle, your business will realize a
number of benefits:
Increase business revenue and reduce risk by ensuring the system can process transactions and meet specified
service levels
Reduce risk in software initiatives by detecting unacceptable performance early when you can do something
about it (prior to testing and release to your customers)
Stay in control of software budgets by eliminating schedule slippage, avoiding system rework or tuning
efforts due to performance issues
Avoid additional and unnecessary hardware acquisition costs
Reduce operational overhead, increased maintenance costs and lost revenue due to poor performance in
production
Your Partner in Success
Digital can help you manage system performance, meet your customer expectations, improve user satisfaction,
reduce costs and succeed so that you can focus on your business. Let us help you plan and realize your
performance objectives.

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For further information please write to info@thedigitalgroup.com

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