Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering ─ Process, Performance Modeling, Requirements, Testing, Scalability, and Practice

“If this book had been available to Healthcare.gov's contractors, and they read and followed its life cycle performance processes, there would not have been the enormous problems apparent in that application. In my 40+ years of experience in building leading edge products, poor performance is the single most frequent cause of the failure or cancellation of software intensive projects. This book provides techniques and skills necessary to implement performance engineering at the beginning of a project and manage it throughout the product's life cycle. I cannot recommend it highly enough.”

–Don Shafer, CSDP, Technical Fellow, Athens Group, LLC

Poor performance is the #1 cause of software project failure. However, performance engineering can be extremely challenging. In Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering, leading software performance expert Dr. Andre Bondi helps you create effective performance requirements upfront, and then architect, develop, test, and deliver systems that meet them.

Drawing on decades of experience at Siemens, AT&T Labs, and Bell Laboratories, Bondi offers practical guidance for every software stakeholder and development team participant. You'll learn how to define and use metrics; plan for diverse workloads; evaluate scalability, capacity, and responsiveness; and test both individual components and entire systems.

Throughout, Bondi helps you link performance engineering with everything else you do, so you can achieve the right performance now and in the future–at lower cost, with less pain.

This guide will help you

• Specify system capacity in business and engineering terms
• Clarify needs to be satisfied by given levels of throughput and response time
• Identify metrics for comparing requirements with actual performance
• Verify the accuracy of measurements
• Use mathematical models to make predictions, plan tests, and preview the impact of changes
• Learn actionable lessons from poor performance
• Avoid common performance and scalability mistakes
• Incorporate performance engineering into agile processes
• Help clients make better performance-related decisions

Andre B. Bondi is senior staff engineer and founder of the system performance analysis consulting practice at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ. His specialties include performance requirements, engineering, analysis, modeling, and testing. He is a Certified Scrum Master.

Andre B. Bondi is a senior staff engineer working in performance engineering at Siemens Corp., Corporate Technology in Princeton, New Jersey. He has worked on performance issues in several domains, including telecommunications, conveyor systems, finance systems, building surveillance, railways, and network management systems. Prior to joining Siemens, he held senior performance positions at two start-up companies. Before that, he spent more than ten years working on a variety of performance and operational issues at AT&T Labs and its predecessor, Bell Labs. He has taught courses in performance, simulation, operating systems principles, and computer architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Bondi holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University, an M.Sc. in statistics from University College London, and a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Exeter.