The capacity of your application to scale and perform is mandatory and vital to your software development and maintenance. An inability to scale with an increasing workload can damage your brand reputation resulting in your customers turning away very quickly.
Essentially, if your application cannot scale effectively with increasing load, the success of your organization will be impacted. Users demand a swift operating application that causes no digital deterioration.
By 2021, organisations that have embraced a performance engineering approach for application development will outperform the competition that has not, in both customer satisfaction and business results”Joachim Herschmann, Gartner 21 June 2018
Many organizations still don’t have such a holistic view of quality. Whilst the functional requirements are collated and tested thoroughly, the application performance is often inadequately captured.
Performance-related defects are difficult to remediate as they affect a larger number of components in different parts of the application. These types of system architectural and design defects are main contributors to technical debt. To avoid these larger technical debts, application leaders should adopt a performance purpose-driven approach in the development and maintenance of their applications.
Joachim Herschmann from Gartner in his article “Adopt a Performance Engineering Approach for DevOps”, concludes that:
Application leaders must reduce technical debt and mitigate application performance risks. They should adopt a combined “shift left” and “shift right” performance engineering approach to build a highly productive software development organisationJoachim Herschmann from Gartner, 18 June 2018
An application that performs well, of course, is dependent on the “eye of the beholder”. According to 2018 research by Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Adopting a proactive performance quality strategy by making it an intentional and explicit requirement within your software delivery program will ensure you are mitigating your application performance risks within your organization.
Key elements of a holistic performance engineering approach to application development include:
Involving and engaging key stakeholders (business, IT and users) from within your organization at the outset is the starting point. Setting up measurable performance goals will contribute to a successful performance testing regime.
