Architecting, developing and testing for performance of tiered collaboration products

Abstract

The collaboration industry has seen an unimaginable explosion since the basic e-mail clients were introduced decades back. The products are now loaded with powerful features and have fierce competition in the market. To win in the marketplace, the offerings have to meet user expectations and demonstrate a high level of performance. The collaboration products aim at personal productivity, group networking and basic communication flow in the enterprise. They form the nerve-system of an organization, with processes of companies constructed around them, therefore ensuring performance-centric development of such products would be a key to their success. In this paper, we discuss the performance-oriented design, development and testing considerations that can find its application in large-scale multi-tiered collaboration products. We present a methodology termed as "Performance in Each Tier" (PET), which encompasses performance throughout the entire development process. PET concentrates on individual and holistic transactions. The paper describes strategies for dealing with performance issues at early as well as later stages of product development. The approach is applicable to products that have evolved over time with growing customer needs and changing business realities. Finding root causes of performance issues in a large product base and regressing functions for performance fixes, would prove more expensive as compared to prioritizing performance considerations along with feature development. This affirms the Performance Engineering concept that performance shall have priority as the functional features do from the commencement of the product development.