Software Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach

Preface

	Software platforms are a written product of the mind.
	--D. S. Evans, A. Hagiu, and R. Schmalensee

WHY THIS BOOK

Few people would disagree with the fact that building a large-scale, high-performance, and scalable software system is a complex task. This is evidenced by the magnitude of required up-front and ongoing financial costs and personnel commonly seen at every large software development organization. Seeking effective, efficient, and economical approaches to developing large-scale software is of interest to the entire software community.

Regardless of its complexity and scope, every software development project is driven by a few common factors:

• It is required to be on schedule because of urgency to be first to market in order to gain a competitive edge.

• It is required to be within budget under the pressure of showing profit and return on investment (ROI) as soon as possible.

• It is required to provide customers with all major functionalities at a minimum.

• And it is required to meet customer's expectations on performance and scalability to be usable.

While management is responsible for providing sufficient budget to cover personnel, development, test infrastructure, and so on, we, the technical staff (developers, quality assurance engineers, and performance engineers), are accountable for delivering the software product under development on schedule and within budget while meeting high standards on performance and scalability.

However, it's not uncommon to see that performance ...