Nobody enjoys slow loading or erroneous applications, and bad user experience already significantly impacts commercial revenue. I’m still wondering why the average response time of mobile sites is 19 seconds. Personally speaking, I won’t wait more than 5 seconds for a page to load.
Whether you follow a waterfall or agile-based development approach, there are three critical touchpoints you need to consider if you want to reach a satisfying user experience. I call these touchpoints domains, and the PEMM will allow you to measure your maturity levels within those.
Level 1 – Firefighting
Those businesses that operate on this level ignore performance best practices and solve most of their issues at production. They often have very frustrated users. Their monitoring approach is reactive and logfile-based. Most performance failures are well known, but it takes a long time to solve them. Organizations that operate in this mode are exposing themselves to high risks.
Level 2 – Performance Validation
Companies that reached this level understood that testing of non-functional requirements is necessary. They have processes and tools that allow the simulation of production load patterns, and they share performance metrics across their organizations. For business-critical applications, they have performance monitoring at the production in place.
Level 3 – Performance Driven
Organizations that integrated early design and architecture validation in their development reached the highest level in this discipline. They have a proactive performance monitoring strategy in place, continuously analyzing and improving use cases and focusing on the end-user experience. As a result, their business units understood the value of user experience and application performance metrics.
There is more to come…
Most companies operate at level 2. However, with the rise of digital services, user experience and reliability will become more critical, and therefore, it’s a good idea to improve your performance engineering maturity level.
Whether you are new to this topic or have been a performance engineering practitioner for many years, we invite you to explore our Gobenchmark platform. Try our free version, upgrade to the professional or the Enterprise plan, and enjoy the knowledge we will share with you.