The current economic downturn has accelerated business consolidation and stepped up the need to innovate. We would like to reiterate that the current software engineering paradigm is reactive, which certainly needs to move to a higher level of maturity

The last change in software engineering life cycle included performance testing. This was an important change as performance testing helps in validating application performance before it goes to production and thus avoids surprises.

However, if serious performance and scalability issues like bad design or bad coding practice resulting in non-scalable architecture are discovered at the fag end of the development, this leads to go; no-go decisions for letting the application go live. A no-go decision leads to lost business opportunity and most often a serious loss of reputation.

The need is to move to the next paradigm of software engineering that can be called as 'performance driven development.' Performance focus through a performance engineering governance office is suggested which would help govern performance right from the business requirements gathering stage till go-live stage in production. This will typically involve mapping performance engineering activities to each SDLC stage. For example, during architecture definition/review stage, techniques like performance modeling can be used to predict the performance of application before getting into serious development. Move to 'performance driven development' will also involve education/change in developers' mindset as they need to appreciate the importance of the performance/ cost of code they write, in addition to the business impact of the functionality.

The suggested shift in the software engineering approach will result in higher predictability and risk reduction by ensuring that the business deadlines are met. This will also help in cost reduction and productivity improvement by ensuring optimal infrastructure cost. Better transaction response time will result in end users spending more time with their customers rather than waiting for the screen to appear. Thus a shift from reactive to a proactive mode is more likely to lead to higher performance and scalability as it would ensure that mission and business critical programs meet their stated objectives.

To sum it up, a move to performance driven development is paramount to realizing better value from technology investments and ensuring that the IT systems are aligned to organization's business and scalability goals.