I think that the web and ecommerce has propelled performance testing to a higher priority in many organizations. One VP of a large financial trading organization tells of the change that ecommerce has created for brokers. It goes something like this:
”Experienced brokers used to know that it would take 20-30 seconds to get a response to queries that they made of their trading systems. It was predictable. So, they would find out what the customer wanted, initiate the query and then ask about the kids, then the wife, and if that went too quickly they would ask about the dog. When the conversation would end, of course, the response would be back and the customer would never know how long it took.”
Life is different today. Every customer can know how long it takes for transactions to complete end-to-end. Even the definition of end-to-end is evolving. In the world of ecommerce it really is order to settlement or order to receipt. In the past, as a transaction crossed from application area to another, there were separations of responsibility that were tightly managed. These smokestacks are being impacted by pressure from the business for an end-to-end view based upon the customer perspective. Performance now needs to be measured in this context in production and tested and predicted prior to release.
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