Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering

If this book had been available to Healthcare.govs contractors, and they read and followed its life cycle performance processes, there would not have been the enormous problems apparent in that application. In my 40+ years of experience in building leading-edge products, poor performance is the single most frequent cause of the failure or cancellation of software-intensive projects. This book provides techniques and skills necessary to implement performance engineering at the beginning of a project and manage it throughout the products life cycle. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Don Shafer, CSDP, Technical Fellow, Athens Group, LLC

Poor performance is a frequent cause of software project failure. Performance engineering can be extremely challenging. In Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering, leading software performance expert Dr. Andr Bondi helps you create effective performance requirements up front, and then architect, develop, test, and deliver systems that meet them.

Drawing on many years of experience at Siemens, AT&T Labs, Bell Laboratories, and two startups, Bondi offers practical guidance for every software stakeholder and development team participant. He shows you how to define and use metrics; plan for diverse workloads; evaluate scalability, capacity, and responsiveness; and test both individual components and entire systems. Throughout, Bondi helps you link performance engineering with everything else you do in the software life cycle, so you can achieve the right performancenow and in the futureat lower cost and with less pain.

This guide will help you

Mitigate the business and engineering risk associated with poor system performance

Specify system performance requirements in business and engineering terms

Identify metrics for comparing performance requirements with actual performance

Verify the accuracy of measurements

Use simple mathematical models to make predictions, plan performance tests, and anticipate the impact of changes to the system or the load placed upon it

Avoid common performance and scalability mistakes

Clarify business and engineering needs to be satisfied by given levels of throughput and response time

Incorporate performance engineering into agile processes

Help stakeholders of a system make better performance-related decisions

Manage stakeholders expectations about system performance throughout the software life cycle, and deliver a software product with quality performance

Andr B. Bondi is a senior staff engineer at Siemens Corp., Corporate Technologies in Princeton, New Jersey. His specialties include performance requirements, performance analysis, modeling, simulation, and testing. Bondi has applied his industrial and aca...