Guerilla Approach
Submitted by Alexander Podelko on Thu, 04/10/2007 - 16:39.
architecture | books | design & development | non-functional testing | performance testing
Mark Friedman reviewed Neil J. Gunther's new book "Guerilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services"
in MeasureIT (free registration may be needed - I hate registrations, but this one is worth efforts if you care about performance: it is a very good newsletter).
Neil tells that "traditional" capacity planning doesn’t work well in today’s environments and you need to use "guerilla" approaches. Term "agile", which is very popular today, is often used for the same, but maybe "guerilla" means the next degree of "agility": most "agile" approaches used still meant to be systematic in some areas. "Guerilla" doesn’t mean to be systematic if I understand it correctly – except that you systematically apply efforts whenever there is an opportunity for the moment.
Probably the same can be said, for example, about Software Performance Engineering (SPE) and early / investigational performance testing. While preached for a long time, not many practice them. Maybe "guerilla" approach is what we need here too?
There is one interesting outcome of the "guerilla" approach: you need somebody to practice it. A person (or a team) who is responsible for performance and tries to do whatever is possible (SPE, capacity planning, early / investigational performance testing, etc.) to make sure that the system will perform well. And has time for that. Some kind of "performance architect" or "performance engineer". When a performance consultant is involved, he is naturally playing this role. But when he goes away, all "guerilla" efforts will die if there is nobody to pickup.
Mark Friedman reviewed Neil J. Gunther's new book "Guerilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services"
in MeasureIT (free registration may be needed - I hate registrations, but this one is worth efforts if you care about performance: it is a very good newsletter).
Neil tells that "traditional" capacity planning doesn’t work well in today’s environments and you need to use "guerilla" approaches. Term "agile", which is very popular today, is often used for the same, but maybe "guerilla" means the next degree of "agility": most "agile" approaches used still meant to be systematic in some areas. "Guerilla" doesn’t mean to be systematic if I understand it correctly – except that you systematically apply efforts whenever there is an opportunity for the moment.
Probably the same can be said, for example, about Software Performance Engineering (SPE) and early / investigational performance testing. While preached for a long time, not many practice them. Maybe "guerilla" approach is what we need here too?
There is one interesting outcome of the "guerilla" approach: you need somebody to practice it. A person (or a team) who is responsible for performance and tries to do whatever is possible (SPE, capacity planning, early / investigational performance testing, etc.) to make sure that the system will perform well. And has time for that. Some kind of "performance architect" or "performance engineer". When a performance consultant is involved, he is naturally playing this role. But when he goes away, all "guerilla" efforts will die if there is nobody to pickup.