Monday, July 11, 2011

Proactive Vs Reactive Approach in Performance Testing

Reactive Approach
The Performance Testing activity is often considered as a reactive way of performance management. In most of the cases, the system performance is never thought of during the early phases of Software Development Life Cycle phases (SDLC). Performance is often thought of only as a last activity after the System Testing phase.

And most of the time , the performance bottlenecks revolves around the system architecture or the system design which is a very high cost activity to think about & in certain cases , the system is put into trash because of the huge deviations in the performance constraints.

Basically waiting for the performance problems to appear & then dealing with it at the end is always not a better approach. Mostly Performance Testing is considered as a reactive approach as there is not much importance is given to the system during early life cycle phases. It is more a ‘fix-it-later’ approach which is not that effective.

Proactive Approach
The Proactive approach anticipates the performance problems well in advance & adopts techniques for mitigating them. The Importance of the Performance is thought about from the Initial phase of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) & various performance engineering activities are identified for the system.

The disadvantages of ‘fix-it-later’ approach are well understood & engineering practices are adopted to analyze the system design in performance angle.

The integration of performance engineering activities with the SDLC phases is provided in the below table.

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