Performance engineering

Performance engineering encompasses the techniques applied during a systems development life cycle to ensure the non-functional requirements for performance (such as throughput, latency, or memory usage) will be met. It may be alternatively referred to as systems performance engineering within systems engineering, and software performance engineering or application performance engineering within software engineering. As the connection between application success and business success continues to gain recognition, particularly in the mobile space, application performance engineering has taken on a preventive and perfective role within the software development life cycle. As such, the term is typically used to describe the processes, people and technologies required to effectively test non-functional requirements, ensure adherence to service levels and optimize application performance prior to deployment. The term performance engineering encompasses more than just the software and supporting infrastructure, and as such the term performance engineering is preferable from a macro view. Adherence to the non-functional requirements is also validated post-deployment by monitoring the production systems. This is part of IT service management (see also ITIL). Performance engineering has become a separate discipline at a number of large corporations, with tasking separate but parallel to systems engineering. It is pervasive, involving people from multiple organizational units; but predominantly within the information technology organization. Increase business revenue by ensuring the system can process transactions within the requisite timeframe Eliminate system failure requiring scrapping and writing off the system development effort due to performance objective failure Eliminate late system deployment due to performance issues Eliminate avoidable system rework due to performance issues Eliminate avoidable system tuning efforts Avoid additional and unnecessary hardware acquisition costs Reduce increased software maintenance costs due to performance problems in production Reduce increased software maintenance costs due to software impacted by ad hoc performance fixes Reduce additional operational overhead for handling system issues due to performance problems Identify future bottlenecks by simulation over prototype Increase server capability Because this discipline is applied within multiple methodologies, the following activities will occur within differently specified phases.