The Evolving Landscape of Software Performance Engineering

Satisfactory software performance is essential for the adoption and the success of a product. In organizations that follow traditional software development models (e.g., waterfall), Software Performance Engineering (SPE) involves time-consuming experimental modeling and performance testing outside the actual production environment. Such existing SPE methods, however, are not optimized for environments utilizing Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) that result in high frequency and high volume of code changes. We present a summary of lessons learned and propose improvements to the SPE process in the context of CI/CD. Our findings are based on SPE work on products A and B conducted over 5 years at an online services company X. We find that (a) SPE has mainly become a post hoc activity based on data from the production environment, (b) successful application of SPE techniques require frequent re-evaluation of priorities, and (c) engineers working on SPE require a broader skill set than one traditionally possessed by engineers working on performance.