Performance Through the Application Development Life Cycle

Abstract

All too often in application development, performance is an afterthought. I once worked for a company that fully embraced the Rational Unified Process (RUP) but took it to an extreme. The application the company built spent years in architecture, and the first of ten iterations took nearly nine months to complete. The company learned much through its efforts and became increasingly efficient in subsequent iterations, but one thing that the organization did not learn until very late in the game was the importance of application performance. In the last couple of iterations, it started implementing performance testing and learned that part of the core architecture was flawed—specifically, the data model needed to be rearchitected. Because object models are built on top of data models, the object model also had to change. In addition, all components that interact with the object model had to change, and so on. Finally, the application had to go through another lengthy QA cycle that uncovered new bugs as well as the reemergence of former bugs.