Blogs/ TECHNOLOGY
Performance Engineering - 6 Reasons you need it and how to approach it
A deep dive into how performance engineering can keep the development process agile and efficient over regular performance testing.
Software development is so much more than writing bug-free code. Software developers need to ensure their systems are scalable, user-friendly, and secure.
So how can developers identify potential performance bottlenecks in everything from cloud architecture to capacity planning much earlier in the development process to stay agile and efficient and facilitate faster live pushes?
Implementing performance engineering techniques in the development cycle can help determine the stability of systems, allowing more flexibility, raw data, insights on system issues, and better opportunities to automate processes and configure components efficiently.
What is Performance Engineering?
Performance engineering is proactive and end-to-end application performance testing and monitoring through continuous feedback loops during the development cycle to ensure your applications are robust, fast, easily scalable, highly responsive, and reliable under various workloads.
Benefits of Performance Engineering
Ensures stable and reliant UX - Testing production loads, user traffic, and network responsiveness to ensure that the UX of your product is optimized efficiently.
Early detection of product performance issues - Performance engineering helps to identify potential bottlenecks in your software along with poor scalability issues well before you deploy your finished product.
Reduced costs - Performance engineering tests for software inefficiencies early in the planning and execution stage of the development process to identify an optimal approach for design which helps reduce costs.
Test Coverage - Identifies the health of the system under all possible scenarios.
Reduced performance tuning costs.
Better customer experience and increased conversion rates.
How is performance engineering different from performance testing?
Performance Engineering
Performance Testing
Performance engineering is a proactive approach that uses tools & techniques to optimize the application performance from the beginning with the metrics in mind and facilitates the discovery and fixing of issues early in the development lifecycle.
Approach 
Performance testing is a subset of performance engineering and is a reactive approach. It consists of testing the product performance after the development lifecycle.
It is a collaborative process built into the development process from the design to the development, and the end-user experience testing.
Collaboration 
Developers, designers, and quality analysts work in silos causing gaps and delayed development.
Faster time to market the bottlenecks are identified in the early stages.
Time to Market 
Slower as the QA testing is done after the development is already complete and requires bug fixes.
More time to work gradually as it is a continuous process.
Test Coverage 
Limited validation scenarios due to budget and time constraints.
Usually, when the performance testing process begins there is already a huge investment of made in the design and development of the software, this is inefficient because the QA feedback is received only after the development and preceding the release, which either delays the release till the defects are fixed or require fixing the defects in the production environment to stick to the schedule. Fixing a defect in the early stages of the development is much more cost-efficient than having to work on it in production or reworking the fixes after the release.
Adopting Performance Engineering
Here’s how performance engineering can be integrated into your software development life cycle.
1. Benchmarking
Defining KPIs for and benchmarks for the application performance for all aspects. Set clear and specific business goals and turn them into measurable performance metrics.
2. Performance Analysis & Strategy
Perform a tradeoff or what-if analysis on various aspects of the architecture or design to assess the impact and make strategic decisions. Careful planning is necessary to ensure that useful metrics are specified, that the right monitoring tools are put in place to collect those metrics, and that analysis of the collected data will reveal meaningful information.
3. Performance Testing and Tuning
Proactive testing of the product during development to identify and fix performance bottlenecks and validating changes and verifying achievement of performance target.
Parting thoughts
As software development is getting more complex and sophisticated, businesses need to move beyond performance testing and tuning and integrating performance engineering checks in their development lifecycle to optimize the software. At doodleblue we provide a dedicated team of experts to work as an extension of your internal team. Contact us now!
