Pulling the all nighter ….. no more!

As technical presales lead at DSI I am often involved in deep technical discussions with prospective customers around software development, and I want to highlight a recent campaign that didn’t exactly go the way I thought it would. Let me set the stage. As our sales guy was taking the lead in prospecting and talking with developers and architects about “Continuous Performance Management” (CPM), I was there for support in case our sales guy ran into some difficult questions. As technical presales you need to know when to step in or step back on these calls. After arming our sales guys with the necessary information I sat back and waited for questions that never arrived. I was ready to talk about reliability, performance, quality assurance and Continuous Integration. What I was hearing instead was developers pulling all nighters when the code was not performing in production like it was in development.

I want to share some feedback from the campaign and elicit your response. The top reasons why development houses don’t have continuous performance management:

1. Don’t have time and can’t see how CPM could save time
2. They only fix performance issues when they happen.
3. Difficult setting threshold values between pass and fail.
4. Can’t see how CPM can reduce costs, as it’s another data stream to be processed by developers and project managers.

Based on our experience here is why we perform continuous performance management during development:

1. Proven cost cutter in application lifecycle.
2. Less project overruns and loss of return business from unhappy customers.
3. More time resolving and less time searching for performance problems.
4. Allows us to discover performance problems when they are cheapest to solve.
5. CPM flags changes in trends over multiple builds.
6. Increases the efficiency of development teams.
7. Reuses existing unit testing infrastructure.

Our continuous performance management product, the CPM Toolkit, provides the means to achieve the above, and has demonstrated tangible benefits for both in house and outsourced development projects.