Chapter 2. Phase 2: Promotion “Performance is a First-Class Citizen”
The next step on the journey to becoming a performance warrior is to get your management and colleagues to treat performance with appropriate seriousness. Performance can be controlled only if it truly is treated as a first-class citizen within your development process.
Is Performance Really a First-Class Citizen?
Performance can kill a web application. That is a simple fact. The impact of a performance issue often grows exponentially as usage increases, unlike that of a functional issue, which tends to be linear.
Performance issues will take your system out completely, leading to complete loss of income, negative PR, and long-term loss of business and reputation. Look back at news reports related to website failures in recent years: very few are related to functional issues; almost all relate to performance.
Performance issues can lead to a requirement for complete re-architecting. This can mean developing additional components, moving to a new platform, buying third-party tools and services, or even a complete rewrite of the system.
Performance is therefore important and should be treated as such.
This chapter will help you to elevate performance to a first-class citizen, focusing on the challenges faced with relation to people, process, and tooling.
People
As the previous chapter explained, many companies hold the view that performance issues should just be solved by developers and that performance issues ...
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