The Digital Group Performance Engineering
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SOLUTIONS | SERVICES | CONSULTINGINFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
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.
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 TuningTuning 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:
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 anumber 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.
www.thedigitalgroup.com SOLUTIONS | SERVICES | OUTSOURCING
THE DIGITAL GROUP, WORLD HQ, 121 VILLAGE BOULEVARD PRINCETON
FORRESTAL VILLAGE PRINCETON,NJ 08540 USA TEL: +1 .609 .524 .2441 ,
FAX: +1 .609 .228 .484 4
For further information please write to
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