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Best Practices for Building Quality and Performance in Apps
A life-cycle approach is the best way to assure application performance is a part of the quality process.
by Steve Dykstra

November 17, 2006

Today's highly complex infrastructures and applications, coupled with limited resources, time constraints, and the need for greater collaboration among IT teams, make implementing an effective application performance assurance strategy a challenge. Despite this challenge and the amount of work involved, businesses want to take their service from good to great, and recognize the fundamental importance for assuring application service. Those businesses that meet the challenge stand to gain substantial benefits, including optimally running applications, satisfied end users, efficient use of IT staff, and more importantly, success and growth.

For mission-critical business applications, application performance assurance—an important part of application quality—is a continuous process spanning both pre-production and production. These applications are critical to your business' ability to improve profitability and extend its market reach. Poorly performing applications can hinder customer service, render employees unproductive, and directly affect revenue. To avoid this chain of events, your business must demand consistently high levels of performance.

To ensure these high performance levels, your application performance assurance practices must measure and provide feedback on how a given system meets the needs of end users on an ongoing basis. You must integrate performance profiling with load testing to ensure well-rounded application performance assurance strategy. Unlike other methods, this combination offers you an end-to-end approach that builds performance into the application early in the development life cycle.

Driven by requirements, application, and system testing is an iterative process strengthened by monitoring practices that provides you with views of application and system performance from both internal and external end-user perspectives. To be truly effective, you must tie this iterative process together with an application performance assurance strategy. This strategy should provide a streamlined way to correlate all performance data so the team can make more informed decisions about changes and improvements.

Weave Best Practices into Quality Assurance Process
While no one process or methodology fits every IT environment, you should consider several general best practices for managing application performance. A disciplined approach is at the heart of an ideal service assurance solution. This solution should bring together the key components of performance requirements planning, predictive analysis, infrastructure testing, and monitoring into a single, integrated process.

IT must also be able to identify and eliminate production performance problems as early as possible. This solution should provide answers to tough performance questions about IT application delivery. Lastly, the ideal solution should allow teams to build performance into the application from the earliest phases of the development life cycle, rather than testing it in the final stages before deployment when it's often too late for you to resolve problems effectively.