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Writer's pictureJosef Mayrhofer

From Reactive to Proactive Performance Engineering

Residents suffer and are frustrated if they experience crawling digitized services, but businesses and government agencies also set themselves at risk. Imagine the government launched a digitized election, and on election day, the entire system becomes unavailable due to performance problems. Similarly, if you are a provider of payment services, your ATMs would become unavailable due to software performance problems. 


The Value of Performance


In the spring of 2023, the famous Ticketmaster website crashed and could not sell Taylor Swift's Eras tour tickets. Customers were very frustrated, and businesses involved lost millions in revenue. A closer look behind the scenes uncovered that the high demand for Taylor Swift's tickets pushed the system to its limits until the site was no longer responsive.

The lesson learned during this Ticketmaster crash is:

  1. We can neglect performance no longer

  2. We must create and revisit our performance requirements

  3. We must make performance a matter for everyone


Cultivate Performance Awareness


Another major challenge is the lack of awareness and knowledge about the importance of performance engineering, which Andre Bondi, Stevens Institute of Technology, confirmed. Stevens launched a government-funded project integrating performance engineering practices into software engineering courses.

Read more about this project at the following link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578245.3584352


In our increasingly digitized world, relying on a reactive approach to address reliability issues is no longer effective. Reactive performance issue resolution entails responding to problems as they occur, typically triggered by user complaints or when performance deteriorates to an unacceptable level.


While a reactive approach is necessary when performance problems arise unexpectedly, it is generally less desirable than a proactive approach. Proactive performance engineering aims to prevent issues before they impact users and is considered a more efficient and cost-effective approach.  


On a mission to revolutionize how organizations manage software performance problems, we've invented a unique Performance Engineering Maturity Model and implemented it on Gobenchmark.io to guide everyone in building fast and reliable IT services, saving businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars.


How does Gobenchmark help?


Instead of relying on the rare number of performance engineering consultants, organizations can use our self-service Gobenchmark performance engineering maturity assessment. After a few minutes, Gobenchmark users receive a score that shows how Organizations are doing and what gaps they have compared to industry standards. This scoring creates awareness. It makes things such as performance maturity measurable, and businesses get upfront information before running into expensive reliability problems.


At the same time, Gobenchmark is accessible to everyone. We all know it takes four or more years for IT students to receive their degree and a few years to accumulate relevant work experience. Suppose we start today by adding basic performance engineering knowledge to education programs. In that case, it will take another four or more years to see initial results and another decade or more to see a broader adoption on the market.


What makes Gobenchmark unique?


The Gobenchmark platform that I have invented measures the unmeasurable. After enterprises lost millions in revenue due to software performance problems, they started the expensive manual problem discovery cycle. A user of Gobenchmark answers 27 discovery questions, and within 2 minutes or less, they see their performance engineering maturity score. The benefit of seeing how organizations and teams mature is that they understand gaps and their impact much faster.


In this digital era, organizations require guidance to address identified deficiencies more than ever. Gobenchmark's maturity scores rely on an AI-backed knowledge-sharing approach. This involves gathering insights from subject matter experts, enhancing them with the Gobenchmark repository of performance practices, and crafting actionable plans to help organizations improve their performance engineering maturity scores.


Evaluating and contrasting maturity scores expedites the detection of shortcomings and facilitates the establishment of industry benchmarks. Just as stock market ratings provide insights into value and risk, Gobenchmark's performance engineering industry benchmark enables organizations to gauge their performance against industry averages and trends.


The need for understanding your organization's performance maturity


Digitized services have been and remain a critical business driver. Businesses compete to attract customers because every client consuming their services equals more revenue and higher profits. The top ten companies in the U.S., such as Apple, Microsoft, or Meta, are digitized businesses and have not existed 30 years ago. High-quality products that are fast and secure are among their top priorities. 


These days, more businesses shift to a digitized service offering because they realize that this drives more consumers to purchase their products. At the same time, we are all slowly becoming more dependent on IT services such as online banking, online grocery shopping, online ticket booking, and food delivery services. If these IT-based services fail due to performance or quality problems, consumers in the suffer.


The stock market once operated without regulations, resulting in significant consumer losses. The introduction of stock ratings by rating agencies led to a turnaround as investors better understood the risks associated with their investments. Gobenchmark offers a comparable rating system accessible to all providers of digital services. Service providers can detect and address IT reliability issues through these ratings, protecting customers from disruptive service outages. 


Explore Gobenchmark on www.gobenchmark.io for free.


Keep up the great work! Happy Performance Engineering!




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