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Building a product with quality in mind not only improves product performance but also helps build a strong reputation and loyal customer base in the long run. Let’s take a closer look at what performance engineering is in detail.

What Does Performance Engineering Stand For?

Say you are building loan management software, a social network application, or a B2B education platform and you want to make sure that it runs smoothly under different circumstances. This process is called performance engineering. It’s an umbrella term for different methods, technologies, and people that are all engaged throughout a software development life cycle to verify compliance with the performance criteria.

In performance engineering, a set of different tests is applied to eliminate bottlenecks and see how the software performs in particular scenarios that are most likely to occur in the post-production stage.

During the project lifecycle, software performance engineering is closely intertwined with the architectural design to detect performance and stability issues. This makes performance engineering a viable method for getting things done right on the first try.

Performance Engineering Best Practices That Drive App Performance

The quality of your end product is much dependent on the effectiveness of the performance engineering strategy that you choose. The right engineering performance objectives establish crucial connections within the team by helping understand what tools and techniques work best.

A software performance engineer understands that concentrating just on the task of moving fast is insufficient. Speed performance engineering is beside the point here since the difficult part is determining how the software benefits the organization, its personnel, and its consumers. If they succeed, the software will be a success as well.

Therefore, the best practices in performance engineering can be split among the teams. Some of these, however, are listed below as being the most crucial:

Make the most of caching: The selection of the appropriate caching mechanism is critical to the product’s proper operation.
Keep the requests to the server to a minimum: This practice is a time-saver and efficiency booster when it comes to performing operations.
Take care of the memory, which is also applicable to network connections and database calls.
Try mastering asynchronous processing, a viable strategy to reduce the workload.
Don’t disregard performance auditing, which is an important technique to avoid unexpected disruptions and accelerate the workflow.

All in all, performance engineering is a tried-and-true method of enhancing the end product’s performance.

Practices for Architecture & Design

Create performance-centered culture;
Specify your performance budget;
Determine the components;
Set your acceptance criteria;
Prepare for deviations from the norm;
Prototype and test.

Practices for Development Testing

Integrate performance into your build validation tests (BVT) and collect data after each build;
Make your UNIT tests more performance-oriented;
Automate quality gates during the build process to prevent reusing subpar components;
Deploy a branching technique to not let the parts break the code or cause its poor performance;
Follow the outcomes of systems and components to see how they change over time.

Practices for Operations

Ensure that disaster recovery, capacity planning, and resiliency are of the highest priority;
From pre-production through production settings, deliver continuous deployment and operations;
Create a production environment using the following deployment methods: canary, live/live, or blue/green;
Establish a system for predictive and scaled growth, as well as tracking features and configurations, and providing ongoing feedback;
Maintain an all-encompassing monitoring approach that includes comprehensive and ongoing feedback in all contexts;
Know your most used features and functionalities across the stack and lifecycle;
Define your hot spots (e.g., software, hardware, configurations, etc.);
Create a procedure for reviewing production incidents that focuses on learning and long-term stability.

Final Thoughts

Poor application performance undermines the reputation and potential success of the product. This is why software performance engineering matters. It encourages tech engineers to shift their mindset toward performance culture within the organization. Performance issues must be identified early in the design stage when it’s easier to fix them.