Getting Testing and Performance Management to Work in Concert
March 17, 2013

Jim Rapoza
Aberdeen Group

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“Testing, 1, 2. Check check. Testing.”

If you've been going to live concerts and rock shows for any length of time, chances are you've seen a roadie or band member on stage doing this common microphone check. For actively touring bands, this is just one part of the lengthy testing and preparation that goes on before a show to ensure that no problems or equipment errors occur to derail the live performance.

But the work doesn't end there if a band wants to have a good show. The soundman is constantly monitoring the performance and adjusting to make sure that everything sounds as good as it can. Stage techs are ready to jump into action if a guitar string breaks or a drum malfunction occurs.

Similar parallels can be found in the world of application performance. Good testing done during the development stage can find issues before an application goes live. And ongoing monitoring and management can detect and repair performance issues as quickly as possible.

However, it seems that many organizations aren't taking this complete approach. Surprisingly, there are some businesses that think application performance management just involves developer oriented testing and ends when the application goes live.

In the Aberdeen report Pushing Application Performance Optimization Past the Development Stage, we found that many of the companies that focused on testing and performance optimization during application development were not also doing vital monitoring and performance management of live, running applications.

Without the ongoing management capabilities, these businesses are at great risk of seeing their applications grind to a halt when a problem happens, much like how a live show stalls when a guitarist without a ready back-up guitar needs to change a string.

Luckily, our data also shows that these organizations are planning to expand their performance management focus past developer-oriented testing, with high numbers expecting to add monitoring, fault detection and other real-time capabilities to their performance management strategy in the next year.

And this only makes sense. In an agile development world, application development never ends. To ensure that the application show can go on, leading businesses need to be prepared for any performance problems that occur.

Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.

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