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The Importance of Code Profiling in Performance Engineering

When we discuss code profiling with a team of developers, they often say, "We don't have time to profile our code: that's why we have performance testers," or, "If your application or system runs very slowly, the developers and performance testers may suggest the infra team to simply add another server to the server farm." 

Developers usually look at code profiling as additional work and as a challenging process. Everyone in the project enters the phase of performance and memory profiling only when something is seriously a problem with performance in production. Due to a lack of knowledge and experience on how to profile and how various profilers work with different profiling types, many of us will fail to identify and address performance problems. As 70 to 80 percent of performance problems are due to inefficient code, it is recommended to use code profiling tools to measure and analyze the performance degradations at the early stages of development. This will help developers and performance engineers to find and fix the performance issues early which can make a big difference overall, especially if all the developers are testing and profiling the code as soon as they write. 

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Why Performance Projects Fail?

Projects involving performance testing and engineering fail for a variety of reasons. The majority of performance project failures occur for various highly complex reasons from every phase of the development life cycle and performance testing life cycle. Sometimes, performance problems are uncontrollable, and it’s out of the control of a project manager, technical architects, or performance engineers. In my experience, from both business and personal levels, most the performance projects fail due to simply a lack of communication between performance engineers, developers, DBA's, business teams, and stakeholders from the beginning, and this ends up causing many other problems which will directly impact application performance and ROI. The only objective of strategic, effective performance testing for any application/product is to achieve a satisfactory return on investment. Performance testing and engineering the applications are risky and always require a lot of trial and error with rigorous testing from the early stages of development.

Failures in performance testing projects must be treated similarly to other business problems. It is essential to understand what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what can be done to prevent it. In most scenarios, the performance engineers have to run the one-man show role to make everyone educate/understand the performance challenges in the end-to-end full life cycle implementations. Working with Practice and COE teams, we continued seeing the same mistakes repeatedly from multiple teams and projects, so, based on my personal experience, I have compiled a  list of reasons Why Performance Projects Fail.