Performance Planning
Planning for performance is the single most important indicator of a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) project’s success. A performance plan does what any other plan does: it optimizes your chance of succeeding in a specific area of a project—in this case, application performance. If you know that successful performance is not necessary for your project, you don’t need a performance plan. My experience with projects that have no performance requirements is limited to college assignments. In business, I find that the importance of performance is second only to core functionality, and comes ahead of security, robustness, and secondary functionality such as add-ons that differentiate products.
A performance plan puts into place the structures and procedures that ensure you have made every attempt to achieve the performance goals of your project. It also improves the quality of a project, and decreases the risks of project failure. The simple act of defining a performance plan immediately increases the chances that your project will attain acceptable performance. Carrying through your performance plan by setting performance goals, measuring against those goals, and using the feedback to improve performance significantly improves the chances of a project’s success.