A few weeks ago, I saw the following mind-breaking text on one of our popular social media platforms:
The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price disappears.
Quality before cost
It’s true! Many of us start off by focusing on the price, but regret our decision as soon as problems appear, due to the low quality. This happens to IT services when we cut the cost of implementation to a minimum. On deploying this low-priced service to our end users, we then discover that massive improvements are required because of the qualitative shortcuts taken during design and development.
Getting your priorities right
No matter which business you’re in, simply building products without taking care of quality won’t get you very far. Overload your new applications with ads—or neglect page load-times and user experience—and you’re guaranteed to lose what you’ve invested. If you really want to go places, aim instead for functionality, an attractive layout, and an intuitive navigation flow.
In this post, I’ll give some good reasons for making sure that everyone gets involved in performance engineering.
Ideally, all performance objectives will be integrated into the daily work of everyone in the value stream. Your designer, developer, and support engineers will all work on improving the effectiveness of applications every single day. They do so because they understand how this approach benefits all parties involved. But what exactly are the benefits of extending performance-engineering tasks to everyone?
Our core mission is to prevent slowdowns as far as possible, and when they do arise, to recover from them quickly. Customers don’t wait around for slow-loading websites or applications. They just move on to more reliable sites. They’ll never tell you how your services are performing badly. You may see a drop in sales as a result but without realizing that outages or slowdowns were behind it.
Creating reliable applications helps us reduce the troubleshooting work. Finding breaking points and fixing them can be time-consuming. Doing it on production while your customers are experiencing massive performance issues is even more disastrous. Not only will you lose many of your users, but your engineers will need to spend valuable development time finding and fixing the troublesome bottleneck.
Everyone benefits!
Knowing the breaking points of your IT services and implementing measures for fast recovery from performance problems will help you to avert a disaster— and gain a competitive advantage at the same time! Situations will often arise where your services have to handle massive request volumes. Also, ensuring scalability during the construction phase will greatly reduce the risk of slowdowns during peak usage hours, as well as helping to prevent any cyber-attacks.
To cut a long story short, focusing your efforts on quality rather than cost will make you a winner. Such investments will pay back several times over during the life-cycle of your business applications.
Contact me at any time if you’d like to learn how to make the performance of your systems better than ever ,so you can spend more time on optimization and improvements.