Waterfall versus Agile’s Continuous Performance Management

For several years, the Waterfall approach, being a well-established and mature process, has been the popular route taken by performance engineers. However, since this is usually conducted at the end of the product development life cycle, the Waterfall methodology is fraught with challenges. For one, major performance issues are usually discovered just before the product goes live, at great cost to companies. The effort is escalated further, if design and architecture changes are needed to fix the snags. 

In order to overcome the pitfalls of the Waterfall approach, performance engineers are now increasing embracing the Agile option, Continuous Performance Management (CPM), which helps organizations to discover and address performance issues in the early stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC). With CPM, companies can integrate performance engineering activities into the SDLC and ensure performance-centric development, where code performance is tested at the method level. 

In order to deploy CPM, several processes need to be implemented, beginning with a Performance Requirement Analysis, which entails collecting and defining both business and non-functional requirements and setting the performance objectives at the start. Impetus Technologies has developed a few NFR templates in Excel to capture such information. As a Best Practice, Impetus captures all such information during the requirement analysis phase and fills it in the template. Later, it is possible to update the requirement changes. 

The second step is Design, which is a very important stage in the SDLC. The architecture and design need to be robust and inherently scalable, as they will help govern the technologies that will be chosen for development and deployment. Impetus has developed a platform called ‘Exelerate,’ that integrates design and architecture Best Practices into the SDLC. 

In the area of development, performance remains the focal area. Here, developers are required to frequently test the code for performance and scalability. They create performance unit-test cases for the module/user story being created. These tests in turn indicate how the code is performing.

Continuous Performance Management (CPM) provides the benefits of build automation and faster deployment for the execution of performance unit test cases and load and stress testing. In Agile projects, the teams mostly rely on a continuous integration system that generates and deploys intermediate build at periodic intervals. The same can be leveraged by the performance engineering team.