Performance Matters

Why Focus On The End-User Experience?

2011-04-25T18:41:35Z

Over the past year or so there has been a lot of buzz around the terms ‘customer experience’ and ‘end-user experience’, as well as advice on how to maximize or optimize experience. Why the focus on the end-user experience? Head on over to BSM Digest for the full write-up.

ITSM, SaaS and Cloud in US Federal Government

2011-04-17T01:04:08Z

This week I attended a regional ITSMF event in Washington DC which focused on the impacts on IT Service Management from Cloud and SaaS technology. The event was well attended including keynotes from Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell and Peter Daniels, VP IT at T. Rowe Price.

Given the location of the event, the primary audience was US Government agencies and their suppliers and contractors. What I found particularly interesting was the level of interest in leveraging Cloud and SaaS technology in Government. We’ve all heard the interest from senior levels in Government, but it seems that the interest is at the grass roots level too.

I was part of the panel discussion at the event, and along with my peers from other vendors, the questions were wide ranging especially around how good process could be used as part of new technology adoption.

There was significant discussion around considerations of performance, security, data retention and ownership as well as general best practices. Part of the discussion around performance centered on understanding that once cloud technologies are deployed (regardless of private or public), then performance, availability and Service Level Management must be considered from a service point of view – that is, what are we delivering to our users, vs looking at this from the various infrastructure components that we might support.

More significantly, this was one of the first events around Cloud I’ve been to where time was not allotted to basic education of what cloud is and its definition. This is a significant step forward in terms of the level of awareness and understanding in the industry.

Mobile Development Environments – Which is APMiest?

2011-04-11T12:04:34Z

We’re working together on the ‘killer Enterprise App’. It’s only an idea right now, but let’s talk about choosing the right mobile development toolset. We’ll worry about the back-end another time, even though we really should be deciding on all this at the same time.

The App’s gotta be cool and it’s gotta run fast! That’s all we know.

Let’s consider some development choices: Native App, AppInventor, PhoneGap, Appcelerator, HTML5. There’s more, but let’s stop here.

Let’s consider Native App Development first: Native apps give the most control over coolness and performance, hands-down. I won’t compare languages, it’s a matter of preference and personally I want to be able to program on multiple platforms. The downside is that I have to code for each platform in the pure native scenario. That’s OK, the end-result is worth the extra effort, right? Well, depends.

Let’s talk about Google App Inventor. I haven’t used it to build an app myself yet, but I have seen it in action. The claim that you do not need to be a developer isn’t really true. You may not need to hand-craft code, but you still have to understand logic-flow and data, which makes you a developer in my mind. It’s relatively easy and you can become proficient and prolific pretty quick. It only supports Android, and the strict visual design will get in the way of experienced programmers.

PhoneGap is a cross-platform development environment which has a strong breadth of capabilities and allows you to create an app that will span devices by “wrapping” your app. It’s open-source and license-friendly, but it doesn’t fit every requirement use-case, so study it carefully for your app before jumping in. I personally don’t like to build enterprise apps this way, but the ability to quickly build prototypes is appealing.

Appcelerator Titanium is another cross-platform development tool which is different from PhoneGap in that it builds native applications for Android, iPhone and iPad. My team is currently using it to build an application and have been impressed. I don’t want to elaborate on the tool-set yet, because if it works well I’ll have a detailed blog on our success.

The challenge that I have for ANY cross-platform development tool is that writing code “once” is a great idea, but in practice, a developer still has to consider the end-platform and make accommodations for each. This means that they need to shift focus, which takes time, so the claimed productivity gains may not be as great as promised. I’ll let you know in the future how our app turns out. Performance considerations across platforms also need to be considered when building apps in these environments.

HTML5 is the new(finally) standard that, in my opinion, is the strongest long-term contender for cross-platform development with the promise that any cross-platform issues will automatically be handled. That may be the promise, but it’s not quite the practice yet for a rich mobile experience. It still has a way to go, so if you commit to it, go ahead and commit to the HTML5 community as well. You won’t be sorry.

That’s just a sample of development opportunities, but here’s a couple things to consider to give your users a great experience.

DESIGN!!! If you want your application to actually be used, you better plan on spending a good part of your up-front work on design. If your app isn’t designed well, no one will want to use it. Native apps, or at least native libraries, if designed correctly, should give you the rich device experience that everyone likes. You need to think through how the app is going to be approached and used. There are a lot of resources available to help you.

PERFORMANCE!!! This is just as tough. Mobile users are very performance-sensitive. If your app is slow, they will abandon and delete it. You need to build performance in, or at least “perceived” performance and you need to test it end-to-end. Instrumenting your application so that it can be monitored is a big plus because your users go EVERYWHERE and you want to know what their experience is from EVERYWHERE!

So, which environment is the APMiest? Right now it’s native apps. They give you the most control. I believe the HTML5 will get there and cross-platform development tools have a chance if they build performance tooling and instrumentation into their platforms. But the ultimate decision on how to create a well-performing application is UP-TO-YOU!

To me the most important thing to remember is that most apps have a very short useful lifespans. This means that whatever you build it in today will probably be refactored into something different tomorrow. Then you can decide all over again.

Happy Coding!

P-Cz

Software Testing PERFORMANCE Conference – 2011

2011-03-24T13:52:14Z

Nashville is probably the second-most famous music city. After Detroit, of course.

I am at STPCon in Nashville – the Software Test PROFESSIONALS Conference 2011, with several hundred of my new best-friends. The weather is wonderful and I find that testers are a unique breed of practitioners. When the lunch line was twenty-minutes long, they all stood patiently, networking while waiting. Except for one jerk who kept yelling, “This is bull!” – wait, that was me. Not really, but these folks are very smart, professional and excited about the value they bring to their organizations and products. Yes, patience seems to be a necessary trait to do this type of work.

I ask four basic questions to everyone I meet:

Are you currently testing any mobile apps?
Are you currently testing any cloud-based apps?
Are you doing “agile testing”?
What is your ratio of testers to developers?

The last question is the one that gets most people rolling their eyes. The first person I met actually said “one-to-one”. He was from Mozilla and working on the Firefox project, so I was duly impressed. The answers from others ran from nine-to-one to “what testers?”

The first two questions got little response because most people have not had the opportunity to test mobile and/or cloud applications, YET. But there was a lot of interest in the topics. I presented to a group about the challenges faced with testing cloud-based and mobile apps and talked about the new challenges in testing these applications, especially when it comes to performance-testing. Test plans need to include testing from inside the firewall, the cloud and, most importantly, the end-user. Folks I talked to were a little overwhelmed with all the complexities involved with composite web applications and the sheer breadth and depth of testing required to ensure end-user performance experience.

What I have discovered is that testing for mobile and cloud generally fall short in best-practice and funding. FUNDING! After all the progress we have made over the years in proving the value of testing, these new, important projects are not getting the resources they need for testing “new-generation” apps. What I tried to convey was that these new apps are complex, and there are a lot of opportunities to learn new technologies and skills to set up “best-practices” for coding and testing. What testers really need is a way to demonstrate the ROI for testing these apps. I see this as an opportunity for a future presentation.

The question about agile-testing seemed to weave a thread through all the presentations and meetings I attended. What I discovered was that only a few people experienced true agile-testing. Most folks who thought they were doing agile practices were actually doing tight, iterative testing. I did meet a few who were doing, what I would characterize, extreme testing. This is where a tester is paired up with a developer to work together on a continuous cadence to test code. They all had good results with this but found that personality matching was important to make this successful. The compelling strategy to make this work is to NOT count bugs found and fixed at this stage of development. This fosters a good working relationship based on improving software quality without creating an adversarial professional environment.

What you should have noticed by now is that there is an obvious question missing: “DO YOU DO PERFORMANCE TESTING?” I didn’t ask the question but instead talked to people about building performance testing into their test plans. I ran into very few people who do performance testing but LOTS OF PEOPLE wanted to talk to me about it. I had a lot of fun showing them tooling and best-practices which they could bring back to their practices.

So, due to popular demand, I extended my stay in warm, sunny Nashville, networking with people determined to improve the quality of applications and application-performance. Yeeha. Sorry.

P-Cz

High-Performing Apps require High-Performance People and Processes

2011-03-21T00:28:30Z

I can find all kinds of things to do on a Saturday, but I was very happy to spend an entire Saturday with five-hundred-eighty of my closest new friends, discussing Agile Development but, more importantly, BEYOND.

The Agile & Beyond Conference, held in Dearborn, Michigan on March 12th, was an exceptional conference tackling how well we have succeeded with Agile Development and how we’re going to be better at what we do. I was most impressed with the Keynote Speakers, Mary Poppendieck, who is a ‘Lean Expert’ and David Hussman, who is an ‘Agile Coach’. These experts bookended the conference and both were dynamic speakers who really know their stuff! I was asked to present on ‘Agile and Mainframe Development’ and sit on a panel with Mary and David.

During the presentation before me I learned that about 80% of folks in the room were consultants, which really made me nervous. Here I was, with what I thought was a pretty good story to tell on my agile-development success, but now I had to tell it to about three-hundred industry experts. Deep breath.

My aversion to Powerpoint actually saved the day. The story I was telling was much more compelling than my slides could convey, so I quickly cruised through them, to the surprise of the moderator. I explained that ‘agile’ development did NOT depend on technologies and certainly not the average age of the development group. It depended on the creativity and aptitude of the team doing the work and the target customer. What made it interesting is that people who work on mainframe projects probably did agile-development long before the idea of waterfall projects came into being, much less agile. They generally describe agile-development as ‘old-time-programming’. Nice comparison! The effectiveness of agile depends on many factors, the most being the maturity and discipline of the people performing the processes. The main thing to deal with is the ‘whole product’ rather than just the development processes.

A panel discussion is never any fun unless there’s some drama, and the good folks took me on, but I decided to turn the tables and challenge the panel with a question of my own: “How does a typical startup company deal with agile development?” The group was very happy to take up the challenge and we discussed how a startup needed to deal with the “whole product” to be successful. A startup is unique, at least these days, because competition is so fast and your good idea is in danger of becoming a commodity very quickly. This is where “whole product agile” comes into play. By utilizing ‘agile’ philosophy and practices for everything from idea to delivery, startup companies can deal with change and challenge very quickly, reducing risk and minimizing failure. They can also seek new opportunities and present them to their customers in a cadence which will provide new value quickly and often.

My favorite part of the conference was a slide that Mary presented titled “People 3.0″. Her contention is that there is a shortage of time, energy and brainpower of bright, creative people. She also proposed that people are not motivated by money as much as they are by “autonomy, mastery and purpose.” Teamwork is inspired by “shared goals, competence, communication, mutual trust and recognition.” Finally, we need “leaders”, not managers. Leaders recruit followers and workers need to be considered “volunteers”, with an option always to “opt-out.”

Nice. This was my favorite conference this year so far. If you get the chance, please check out http://agileandbeyond.org for more information.

So, how does this apply to high-performance applications? Performance needs to be “built-in” to the development process but, more importantly, needs to be a business requirement. This is where “whole product” comes into perspective, BEYOND just agile-development. You need the WHOLE delivery team, and not just development, working in a “agile” environment to make sure that high-performance is integrated into the entire process.

P-Cz

Just Another Mobile Monday

2011-03-07T19:31:57Z

It’s like it’s the eighties all over again! Clothes are weird, music stinks and PROGRAMMING ROCKS!

I played in a band through the seventies and by 1980 I was serious about technology. Good thing too, because that was when the PC revolution began and computer programming was cool, fun and lucrative.

It’s like we’re in a time-machine, because programming is suddenly fun again. Ahh, mobile development; “anything goes, no ‘best practices’, what’s testing?, and who cares about performance monitoring?”. Just code and collect, right?

OK, wake up and just go to this site -www.mobilemonday.net

Mobile Monday (MoMo) was created over a decade ago in Finland in the usual way – to discuss technology over drinks. It has since spread around the world and has kept it’s casual character.

These are compelling times in technology. As the world economy begins the rev it’s engine, mobile technologies are here to support growth, savings, new markets, and you need to be ready! Whether you’re a marketer, designer, or a programmer, this time is yours. You need to collaborate with your colleagues to understand what they’re doing and learn from each other so that we all can quickly make some rational decisions on the best ways to get things done. Mobile Monday is a great place to meet people, learn and share.

Now, if you’re in Detroit, MIchigan, go here: http://www.mobilemonday.net/category/detroit or here: http://mobilemondaydetroit.org/ …. and put this on your calendar:

March 14th, 6pmEST, Compuware Bldg, Downtown Detroit.

If you’re somewhere else, look up your local Mobile Monday and DON’T MISS IT!

Linda Daichendt, (marketingwithnewtechnology) had the vision to see that Detroit and Michigan had the marketing and technology know-how and willpower to deliver mobile solutions. If you’re interested in mobile technologies, you need to meet Linda! Glenn Everitt, a Compuware Eagle, and Linda have put a lot of thought and energy in the Detroit Mobile Mondays and it’s well worth your time.

C’mon honey, let’s go make some noise – at the ‘Mo’tor City Mobile Monday, (is that MoMoMo?) in March!

P-Cz

About Mobile Monday
MobileMonday (MoMo) is an open community platform of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influential individuals fostering brand neutral cooperation and cross-border P2P business opportunities through live networking events to demo products, share ideas and discuss trends from both local and global markets. For more information, visit http://www.mobilemonday.net/.

Your Application running slow? Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda!

2011-02-21T14:17:43Z

Well, I woulda instrumented my code, I coulda monitored my back-end infrastructure, and I shoulda implemented real-user monitoring.

A colleague commented the other day that he noticed that some companies were regressing in their application performance maturity.

WHAT??? How is that possible?

Everyone involved in application performance are supposed to climb UP the maturity model, not get worse. Technology progresses, right? Well, let’s think:

The last ten years have seen a decline in budgets. In IT the phrase “do more with less” became the status quo and many folks in Aps & Ops did their best with what they already had in place. Many had to let their performance tooling go away and settle for cheaper or open source solutions.

Then came the NEW APPLICATIONS. Web-based, internet-hosted, these apps had enormous criticality to the business but many CIOs closed their eyes and hoped that the new technologies would support the performance that customers expected and demanded. What they don’t know won’t hurt them, right. It’s what they don’t know that won’t bring in the business.

Every time I think “I’ve seen it all”, I see more.

Websites that performed pretty well until the Marketing Department decided it was time to have a campaign which required some fancy flash-programming which slowed their web experience to a crawl. If only they had tested that code for performance – woulda, coulda, shoulda!
Applications that seemed to work well in a test environment, but when it was deployed on a wide-scale geographic basis, became inconsistent. If only they had thought through a content-delivery-network (CDN) strategy – woulda, coulda, shoulda!
Slow-loading scripts, mass-quantities of tiny images, dozens of ill-fated connections, errors, ‘worst-practices’ in coding and poor choices in design. If only the developer had picked up and read a book by Souders – woulda, coulda, shoulda!
Applications thrown into the cloud on a wing and a prayer, somehow thinking that virtualization and cloud-computing would make their application perform faster. If only they had investigated their CSP with a tool such as CloudSleuth – woulda, coulda, shoulda!
Mobile applications, well – woulda, coulda, shoulda!

Performance problems are much easily addressed with some up-front planning. What is the performance requirement for your application? Don’t know? Don’t start constructing until you do!

The morale of my little story is PLANNING. APM tooling provides you the ability to ‘plan for performance’ as well as ‘test for performance and ‘monitor for performance’. The ROI on APM tools is stronger when you apply them ‘up-front’ in your SDLC, because it’s much cheaper to build performance into your application than to try and address performance once it’s deployed.

Because, once you lose that customer…. ‘WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA!’

P-Cz

Mobile Technology Performance – An APM Love Story

2011-02-20T04:25:52Z

OK, full disclosure here, well semi-disclosure. I’m writing my blog about a customer. I am not naming the company, but I will say that they are my favorite place to shop for electronics.

First, the love. I was shopping for a flat-screen television a couple months ago and found a ‘one-day’ deal online. I noticed that my local store had it in stock and I hurried over there. There it was – a beautiful 65-inch plasma TV, way more than I needed but it was last years model and the deal advertised online was too good to pass up.

BUT, the price on the item in the store was not the advertised deal I saw on my Droid App. I asked the young man at the counter about it but he couldn’t find anything in their inventory that reflected the price I saw and when we went online, the deal seemed to disappear! I took out my trusty Droid and launched their ‘app’ which had a nice scanning feature. I scanned the bar-code and “VOILA”, the item appeared with the sale price. I triumphantly held up my phone and got the deal I expected, YEA CLOUD!, wait that’s another blog. YEA, ME and YAY APM, because their mobile application performed flawlessly in the store. The TV was delivered a couple days later and I’m a happy customer.

BUT WAIT! BETRAYAL! (OK, I’m being melodramatic).

Last week my family went back to that same store to upgrade their Verizon phone service and get two smart phones for my teenagers, who I want to track via Google Latitude. The deal was for two free phones if you sign up for two years service. The phones were what they wanted and we were ready to go.

BUT NO! The store’s internet service was down, so they couldn’t process the order!

WHAT? The entire store seemed to be knocked out of anything that required internet service, SORRY!

NO SALE!

Disappointed, the kids had to wait a week but finally got their phones yesterday, nice HTC Android phones. However, my favorite store let me down and although I’m not angry, I am disappointed in their customer service. In spite of all the good experiences I’ve had on their website and in their store, this is the story I’m talking about.

The morale of the story? First, always have a business backup plan when your technology fails. The store should have something other than a “sorry, come back another day” answer to their problem. Technology performance is never guaranteed; you need a good business continuity plan when the technology fails. Even if it’s something minor like a coupon or something else to satisfy the inconvenience your customer experienced, it’s all part of your technology performance plan. Application Performance Management is more than applying technology, you need to have processes in place to help you manage your service-levels and respond to any issues. Hopefully you’re responding proactively, before issues affect your customers.

It all comes back to the commitment you make to your Apps. In this case the commitment to app-performance was their but the backup plan was weak when there was an issue. Technology WILL fail, so there needs to be human contingency to ensure business continuity and happy customers.

FORGIVENESS.

In any event, I will forgive my favorite store and hope that they will improve their customer experience to include how to treat their customers when technology fails. Oh, and it’s NOT cyber-stalking, kids!

P-Cz

MobiDevDay in Detroit!!! The MObile CITY rocks!

2011-02-20T04:32:21Z

It’s a beautiful sunny February Saturday and I’m spending it with hundreds of my bestest programmer friends. So, why would three-hundred and fifty developers PAY to get together on their DAY OFF to talk about mobile development?

Because it’s FUN to be a PROGRAMMER again!

I started my technical career a long, long time ago at the cusp of the PC revolution. I was a single-digit registered Windows development programmer when everything seemed new and possible.

HERE WE GO AGAIN!

Enterprise Mobile Applications are exploding and the opportunities are enormous. David McKinnon, a talented developer and technical community advocate/activist, thought that it would be a good idea to get a few ‘friends’ together to talk about mobile development. As the day began and everyone gathered, the buzz in the room told me that this is no ordinary developer gathering. Developers from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Canada came to talk mobility ‘best practices’, how best to build applications and generally see what cool things were happening in the mobile development community.

Sessions are happening on IOS, Android, Mobile Web, WP7, OpenGL, PhoneGap, App Inventor, even Kinect!

Wait, where’s the Performance Management session for mobile? Huh? None?

OP-POR-TU-NI-TY!!!!

There is so much going on in the development communities at all companies and talent is scarce when it comes to the design and development of enterprise mobile applications. Testing, deployment and monitoring skills are also badly needed. Mobile development is NOT ‘just another platform’; use-cases are much different than non-mobile application development and companies realize that the return-on-investment is very quick.

So, back to MobiDevDay. As I walk around, visiting each session, I notice a broad range in developers ages, skills and application-development maturity. This is nice, because us old ‘data processors’ actually have a little bit of an edge in developing well-performing applications. Knowing how data moves inside of a program always serves you well when developing anything, and writing old-time assembler where computing cycles were scarce help when paying attention to things like memory management and power-consumption on a mobile device.

Corporate developers, entrepreneurs, small businesses, independent consultants, experts, generalists, mainframers, gamers, managers, students, recruiters; all present at MobiDevDay. Everyone is learning and sharing stories. I got to talk at lunch about what Compuware is doing with mobility.

Detroit Walk of Fame

The story we had fun sharing is the project we’ve been working on with the City of Detroit. The City’s entertainment committee approached Peter Karmanos with a request to build a mobile app prototype which would support their “Detroit Walk of Fame” initiative. I gathered some bright designers and developers to put together a app which would allow walking tourists the fun of exploring locations where interesting events happened and happen around the city. Easy to build, right – there’s lots of apps like this. We decided to add a little feature that will allow you to unlock ‘easter-egg’ content when you are in proximity of the event location. I’m trying to decide if we should use multiple development frameworks, so that we can do some proper performance (OPPORTUNITY) comparison. If so, we’ll have a lot to talk about at the next MobiDevDay.

After lunch Glenn Everitt talked about Mobile Mondays and topics that folks would like to cover there. I got to talk to people about the newly formed trade association, the Mobile Technology Association of Michigan, of which I am a board member. It’s amazing how far ‘we’ have come in communicating and collaborating as a mobile development community.

Back to the afternoon sessions. I see our downtown neighbors from Quicken Loans, who are always working on cool stuff, and I see new customers who are working to make technical implementation decisions. There’s hardcore coders are looking to see if they can pick up some tips and I’m asking everyone how they plan to test their app for performance on a large scale. But the overwhelming theme is the “community” around mobile development. Everyone’s interested in every platform, because the technology landscape changes in some way every week. I’m already thinking about how we host a MobiDevDay that will bring together thousands of developers! Dave, take a deep breath.

So, everyone, take a good look at your Saturdays, because there will be another MobiDevDay soon! Let us (Dave) know what you’d like to see at the next MobiDevDay and come join the fun! We’ll have a session on mobile-app-performance, too! Forget the hoopla and drama in foreign cities, roll up your sleeves and build some good old Detroit muscle, uh, mobile-apps in the “D”!

P-Cz

Learn more about MobiDevDay here.

Watson’s Jeopardy Success Secret? Mainframe Performance

2011-02-17T17:02:44Z

I must admit, when I first heard about Watson, a computer that competes with—and beats—human beings on Jeopardy, I wasn’t too impressed. Pump enough information into a computer and eventually it will know as much as or more than the best of the best Jeopardy contestants. Still, I tuned in Monday night because it’s what we usually do if sitting down to dinner at 7:30 and because I was curious. As expected, Watson ran up an early lead. What became clear was that Watson’s advantage was about speed. The other contestants were buzzing in with most likely the correct answer, but they weren’t fast enough to beat Watson. That was impressive.

When you boil it all down, who is this Watson? Watson is a big mainframe-like computer. (Technically, Watson is Power 7 chip technology, similar to z196 technology.)

Could it be that what’s powering the most talked about and interesting technology today is what many considered to be a dead or dying technology yesterday? Only a computer with mainframe-like technology has the horsepower to process the unimaginable amounts of data and algorithms to play Jeopardy and to find the answer first.

Of course, to those companies and their engineers that rely on a mainframe to hold and process their most secure and business critical data, this is no surprise. But the average person has no idea that when they submit their next online purchase, a mainframe computer is in the background processing their credit card information. And it’s not only horsepower where mainframes far outperform their smaller counterparts. The world’s largest enterprises rely on them when security and scalability are top priorities. So if you’re one of them, what are you going to do to make your super computer a champion like Watson? Let us know and we’ll be there to provide the most focused experts and technology in the world to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment.