With all of your competition online now, consistent and high performance of your applications has never been more important. Doing performance testing is well and good, but it’s only useful if you know what to do afterwards. Finding out the speed of your system and even identifying potential bottlenecks doesn’t fix the problem for you. It takes expert analysis of that data and in-depth reviews of non-functional requirements to determine the next step on the road to optimization. Fixing the wrong thing could end up being detrimental instead of helpful. Far too often, companies reactively respond to declining performance issues instead of implementing proactive tools and processes to manage performance.

It helps to first understand the difference between performance testing and performance engineering and optimization. Performance testing is similar the tests run by a doctor or nurse. They identify that a problem exists. Performance Engineering and Optimization is the diagnosis and treatment plan. When you’re sick, you don’t try to fix everything in your body all at once, you focus on precisely what’s wrong. Similarly, trying to optimize every tiny thing in an application is foolish. It’s very important to know and understand what needs fixed and if it’s worth fixing at all.

Performance Engineering generally has three areas of management: service level, capacity management, and problem management. Service level management is primarily concerned with detecting problems, validating service level compliance and identifying user transaction trends. Transaction response time and trend analysis are key components for this level of performance monitoring. Capacity management focuses on historical trend analysis to predict possible future non-compliance. This area of management ensures necessary capacity is added in advance of system performance degradation. Finally, problem management involves digging out the root cause of problems relating to performance, generally by identifying poor design or coding practices, operating system changes, or re-evaluation of device parameters.

QA Mentor’s Performance Engineering and Optimization service is here to help you professionally analyze, find, and resolve performance bottlenecks that could be holding your company back. By using end-to-end performance measurement, our highly skilled performance engineers can gauge the capability of your current system, pinpoint and analyze resource consumption, and assess the system’s performance against non-functional requirements. 

Trying to optimize a system without adequate measurements is foolhardy, so it’s critical to measure the correct things. QA Mentor will work with you to determine the problem or problems you are trying to solve and measure the associated functions to come to a complete diagnosis. These measurements can tell you where optimization may help, but they don’t tell you if that specific optimization is worth doing. That analysis is also something QA Mentor’s expert performance engineers can assist you with to develop a cost/benefit analysis related to any changes.

Most programmers now how a system works, but not how it performs or what to do with performance results. Our team of specialists can come in at any stage and sit with your IT team to locate the ideal areas for improvement. If you have performance results in-hand and don’t know quite what to do with them, we can step in and help you to analyze the results. Useful metrics involved in this process are error rates, active user counts, system requests per second, bytes in/out, CPU and RAM utilization, and database queries. With our experienced eye, we’ll locate bottlenecks and re-verify software specifications and hardware to eliminate any performance faults and hidden troubles. 

If performance testing hasn’t been done yet, our team can perform the testing and optimization in tandem to expedite your results. Analyzing your system from all possible angles, we’ll be able to profile and diagnose any issues. We’ll offer our expert recommendations that could be as simple as horizontal scaling by adding more hardware, or something more involved such as database tuning or increasing thread counts. We can even assist you with ongoing performance activities such as deploying and configuring monitoring software, weekly performance reports, database statistics, and identifying trends for capacity planning.