Managing software performance in the globally distributed software development paradigm

The Information Technology (IT) industry continues to lose close to GBP 45 billion each year as a result of underperforming applications. Our observations, while troubleshooting a number of projects on performance related issues, has been that the root cause for most of these problems lies in shortcomings at the Requirements Engineering, Architecture and Design or System Integration Testing phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). We attribute this to a lack of awareness on the basic principles of Performance Engineering in terms of the activities that need to be performed in this context and when and how in the SDLC should these be done. This problem is particularly accentuated in projects executed using the globally distributed software development model owing to the geographic dispersion of the development teams. This paper proposes an experience based methodology on how to manage the performance of an application that is developed under this radically new development paradigm.