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Good performance is one of the most critical factors for the success of an IT product or service.

Too frequently performance problems are identified at the end of a development project.
Consequences are delayed time-to-market, lost revenues, increased development costs, and a less competitive product.

Good understanding of performance requirements, performance implementations, and performance validation is essential to avoid this.

Performance Basics

Background

There are many reasons why performance issues get critical to the point where development projects fail, such as:

  • Weak or no understanding of performance issues
  • No generally accepted view of what should be regarded as performance or performance issues
  • No generally accepted definitions of performance requirements
  • Few methods to set performance goals for for programmers on a coding tasks
  • Consequences of performance problems are underestimated ("Add more hardware" is a too common misconception ... )
  • Other misconseptions such as "Performance can be added to a product once it is ready".
    It can't. Good performance comes from well defined requirements and deliberate and focused work on these requirements.
  • No common vocabulary for performance issues. The consequences are misunderstandings.
  • How to design and achieve good performance has been a neglected subject in education.

These are just a few topics. The list can be made much longer.

If the car industry or the airplane industry put that little attention to performance issues, most people would not dare to drive or or fly.
Hopefully it will not stay that way ...

The purpose of the coming web pages under this tab is to provide a basic understanding of performance and performance issues of computer systems.

Topics to be covered

The topics that will be covered under this tab are conceptual items, such as:

  • Performance Classes or types of performance
  • Performance Conditions
  • Performance Metrics
  • Performance Evaluations
  • Performance Presentations
  • Performance Conditions
  • Performance Test Methods

The information is based on two decades of work on design and assurance of performance of critical systems in the telecom and financial industry.

 

 

Performance Basics