The Role of Continuous Performance Engineering
Following our previous discussions on the pivotal role of software performance in affecting business outcomes, we now focus on Continuous Performance Engineering as the proactive approach to software performance management.
Continuous Performance Engineering (CPE) is a key aspect of ensuring that software applications meet and exceed performance, scalability, and reliability expectations. CPE represents a systematic enhancement of application performance, offering a solution to swiftly identify and address performance regressions, ensuring they never compromise production.
More specifically, practicing CPE involves the following:
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Embrace Continuous Improvement
CPE is not a one-time effort, but a continuous journey. It involves regular testing, monitoring, analysis, and optimization throughout the entire software development lifecycle to streamline the development process and fortify user experience.
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Shift Left in Performance Testing
“Shift left” means that testing is done as soon as possible after the code is written. By integrating performance testing early in the development process, teams can identify and address performance issues sooner. The “shift left” approach allows for faster feedback and reduces the likelihood of costly performance bottlenecks later in the development cycle.
With CPE, you get all the business benefits from optimizing your software’s performance, but there are also operational advantages of CPE:
- Early Issue Detection: Identifying performance problems early in development prevents them from reaching production, saving time and resources.
- Scalability Insights: Early performance data enables better resource scaling decisions.
- Improved Reliability and Stability: Consistent testing leads to a more robust system.
- Faster Time-to-Market: By addressing performance concerns early in the development process, teams can avoid last-minute rushes to fix critical performance issues before deployment, potentially accelerating time-to-market.
- Holistic DevOps Collaboration: Encourages cross-team collaboration, integrating performance considerations into the entire development lifecycle.
- Feedback-Driven Optimization: Ongoing monitoring and testing provide data for iterative performance improvements over time.
Who benefits from CPE?
Essentially every stakeholder, from developers and QA teams to DevOps, product managers, business executives, end-users, and security professionals.
Reconciling Performance Testing with Agile Software Development
In today’s software development landscape, agile methodologies and DevOps have changed the way teams build and deliver software, emphasizing quick iterations and frequent releases. This means that traditional performance testing approaches, which often involve extensive planning, scripting, and execution, may seem incompatible with the Agile philosophy.
The good news is that it is possible to conduct effective performance testing in an Agile environment by leveraging automated testing and analysis. This allows for the quick and repeatable execution of performance tests, enabling teams to assess performance on-demand and as part of their continuous integration process. Subsequently, your DevOps experts can focus on their core task — creating code — while your business can scale at the required speed.
Thus, by embracing Continuous Performance Engineering (including shifting left) and adopting Agile-friendly automated performance testing, teams can deliver software not only at speed but at speed with high quality.
Perfana’s CPE solution
Perfana helps teams to implement the best practices of Continuous Performance Engineering in the agile environment. We enable CPE integration within CI/CD pipelines, ensuring performance testing is not a speed bottleneck.
Our solution offers:
- Golden path configuration of metrics collection, dashboards and performance requirements for common, well-known technology stacks
- CI/CD integration with all common CI/CD platforms
- Automated analysis of performance requirements and performance regressions across any conceivable metrics and traces
- Root-cause analysis: Offers tools for in-depth performance analysis to support data-driven decisions.
Our team is ready to assist you in implementing a CPE strategy in your business case with Perfana’s expertise: info@perfana.io.