What happened the last time you lost $5 million? This is how much many enterprises lose for every hour they have a web or core system outage.
That's just one finding of a performance engineering study commissioned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Conducted by independent research firm YouGov, this survey of 400 development and IT professionals investigated the state of performance engineering and its business impacts. Other findings include:
- 70 percent of respondents agree that the importance of performance engineering is increasing today. Two-thirds cite complex composite applications as a reason.
- 50 percent of organizations have repeatedly experienced slowdowns and outages due to traffic spikes.
- Public websites and core line-of-business systems are most affected by slowdowns and outages. The average firm expects to lose $100,000 to $500,000 per hour when they have a major outage. Large enterprises can lose over $5 million per hour.
- Performance engineers are more likely to see design inspections as a key performance engineering job responsibility than their peers in IT ops and app development.
- IT ops and app development managers expect performance engineers to be monitoring post-deployment system performance.
- Performance engineers may see themselves as playing a more consultative role, while others in the organization may see them playing a monitoring role.
- Performance engineers have less confidence in key performance metrics than their peers in IT ops and app development; they may be more aware of the limitations of metrics.
- Nearly half of respondents would consider only proven enterprise tools in the future. But more than a third say they'll use open source and homegrown tools, and another 21 percent say they'll use a mixture.
Performance engineering is a culture, not a role
Taken as a whole, the findings point to a major transition in performance engineering. While performance engineering is often defined narrowly as ensuring that nonfunctional requirements are met (things like connection speed, memory use, and throughput), the study found a clear trend toward a much broader application of the term.
Performance engineering represents a cultural shift in the way organizations view their essential processes. It embraces practices and capabilities that build in quality and performance throughout an organization, including functional requirements, security, usability, technology platform management, devices, third-party services, cloud, and more.
No longer limited to the "performance testing" checkbox at the end of the development lifecycle, performance engineering has the potential to transform your technology, your business, and your end-user experience.
About the survey
YouGov interviewed development and IT professionals in April 2015 using a 15-minute online survey. The survey reached 400 different US companies, each with at least 500 employees. It asked a series of questions designed to capture many facets of performance engineering.
The survey was conducted blindy, so that no one knew that Hewlett Packard Enterprise had commissioned it.
Add your voice
Although the survey is complete, we would love to hear from you. How does your organization fare relative to those surveyed? Do you disagree with any of our findings? Are there areas we missed that we should survey next time? And would you like to participate in our next year's survey?
Keep learning
Take a deep dive into the state of quality with TechBeacon's Guide. Plus: Download the free World Quality Report 2022-23.
Put performance engineering into practice with these top 10 performance engineering techniques that work.
Find to tools you need with TechBeacon's Buyer's Guide for Selecting Software Test Automation Tools.
Discover best practices for reducing software defects with TechBeacon's Guide.
- Take your testing career to the next level. TechBeacon's Careers Topic Center provides expert advice to prepare you for your next move.
