Performance Engineering- Early involvement with Development

[Walter Kuketz]

I am interested in learning how many performance engineering and performance testing teams are interacting with the application development teams well before the performance testing phase. Are you involved in requirements planning for non-functional requirements? Do you provide the development team guidelines and best practices for writing performant code? How much application knowledge do you bring to the performance testing process? As the lead performance engineer and tester, do you design the test scenarios for the applications?

Thanks
Walter

[peter.jacobson_ANJYAVYFTD]

I am also interested in the answer to this question. In our shop there is usually little or no early involvement with the developers. Our first view of a new application is when QA performs load testing. Many embarassing situations occur at that point.

[Walter Kuketz]

I am working on quantifying the value of early involvment to our customers, I see two tracks for early involvement; 1) performance testing, better understanding of the application under test leads to better test scenario's, as well as more efficient test scehduling, and 2) building better software by introducing performance tasks and activities into the SDLC. Highliting the non-functional requirements, and focusing on the use cases for those.

[ron.miller_OVPHQHMMHU]

I recently completed an engagement with one of our largest financial companies that built a cash management application which was supposed to handle 8000 users at peak load. We were brought into the project after they went live and found that the application could not support more than 200 users. We spent three months working with the developers and IT staff to get the application working.

As disastrous as this sounds, it is not all that unusual in my experience.

[Scott.Barber]

This is an area that I regularly work with clients on. I've attached the graphic I use as a starting point for an implementation model. The clients that have implemented it have been very successful.