Application Performance Assurance White Papers

We have compiled a collection of white papers to help you learn more about Compuware's Application Performance Assurance solution. 

Get Performance Requirements Right — Think Like a User
By Scott Barber, Chief Technologist for PerfTestPlus, Executive Director of the Association for Software Testing and Co-founder of the Workshop on Performance and Reliability

Performance testing is hard. It's hard technically, logically, logistically and managerially. In my years of experience as a performance consultant, I've seen many performance-testing challenges conquered. I've also seen many challenges that the software testing industry as a whole continues to face, but with which it has made virtually no progress since Y2K.

Performance testing is still largely under-done, under-funded and under-scheduled. Performance testers are still finding it difficult to interact directly with development teams due to organizational structure, but this is changing. We seem to have made no progress at all in the areas of determining application performance requirements, goals and meaningful objectives for the performance-testing effort.

This paper is broken down into several areas through which we will walk sequentially to establish requirements, goals and objectives that will significantly assist your team in assuring adequate application performance--or at least expected application performance.

Best Practices for Building Performance in From the Start
To ensure high performance levels, application performance assurance practices must measure and provide feedback on how a given system meets the needs of end users on an ongoing basis. A well-rounded application performance assurance strategy requires integrated performance profiling with load testing. Unlike other methods, this combination offers an end-to-end approach that builds performance into the application early in the development life cycle.

In this white paper, you'll learn the best practices for testing and assuring application performance and how this disciplined approach made quite a difference for one Southern university.