In a fast-paced world, we surely cannot have laggard products, right? As digital transformation grows by the day, users’ expectations have also risen from the products they consume. Thus, to keep up with not just the latest in industry but to meet user-expectations as well, organizations need to buckle up in every possible manner – especially when it comes to their performance engineering strategy and solutions.
Performance engineering comprises a gamut of pipelines and facets which focus towards the non-functional requirements of a product. Often neglected and executed at later stages, performance engineering is not looked at with the needed gravity. This causes an array of pain points post development and it then becomes difficult for remediations. Performance engineering thus, needs to be incorporated from the very early stages – with a shift-left approach. But are all organizations ready to embrace this journey and meet the desired user-expectations?
A Wholesome Approach
Performance engineering is no longer limited to the conventional processes and is increasingly shifting to a more agile mode for meeting user-expectations – efficiently and swiftly. Users often shift their allegiance from one product or another, if it doesn’t meet their expectations. For instance, when it comes to the response time of a product, a user would generally not stay on that website or application for more than a few seconds – laggard applications or websites produce a dismal user-experience. Thus, performance engineering becomes an imperative effort – this isn’t just limited to performance testing but becomes an umbrella effort which should ideally begin alongside the development stage and continue post release as well. This essentially points towards a shift-left and shift-right approach.
For meeting user-expectations seamlessly, performance engineering needs to follow a comprehensive path – from the very get-go to even after the product is live. Identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks in the early stages of an SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) helps in minimal efforts at later stages. But this doesn’t mean that the effort should stop at the beginning itself – it becomes ongoing in terms of effective monitoring and feedback post release as well. Herein, APM or Application Performance Management comes into picture. With APM, a coherent performance analysis and monitoring can take place – in pre-production or production environments. Finding anomalies or any deflections before moving to live helps effectively in eliminating any bottlenecks. For this, certain open-source tools and technologies become more beneficial and a feasible option to effectively monitor the performance of applications.
Thus, a wholesome performance engineering approach is the go-to strategy for meeting users’ expectations and delivering a product sans bottleneck.
Embracing the Change
The new-age nuances of performance engineering call for organizations to understand and embrace this change comprehensively. The older Waterfall methods have shifted to an Agile mode and even DevOps – a change much needed within organizations. As DevOps integrates development and operations teams, addressing users’ rising expectations requires comprehensive end-to-end performance engineering efforts to effectively meet user demands.
But organizations need to coherently adopt and understand the benefits of such a strategy – ensuring efficient deliverables and adding value to their clients. As DevOps is a difficult yet rewarding journey to embark upon, new and comprehensive performance engineering solutions need to also be considered – this would surely help in optimizing resources, incorporating CI/CD pipelines, automating processes, using the latest performance testing tools, continuous monitoring post release, etc. With such an end-to-end strategy in place, it would speak volumes for the organizations’ goodwill itself.
Thus, embracing a change can be challenging but organizations need to look beyond – transcend into a future which is sustainable, reliable and expedient. With the growing demands and expectations of users worldwide, organizations need to keep pace and model their functions accordingly. Effective performance engineering solutions will come in handy not as another “different” strategy but as a much needed one, in this day and age. From the development stage to monitoring, performance engineering has an immense value-add to organizations looking to shift towards a more agile and expeditious environment. So, are you ready to embrace this change in all its glory?