Performance Tuning: An Agile Approach - Mike Stockdale

Performance tuning is often a critical issue in the development of enterprise applications. But are agile methods appropriate for this task?
Traditionally, up-front analysis and design have tried to understand and meet performance requirements. The poor results from this approach have led many to leave performance issues until all functional requirements have been implemented. But then too often we are left in a last minute panic with limited options.

This presentation describes how agile techniques have been successfully applied to meeting performance requirements. The principle of rapid feedback encourages us to put working software in customers' hands early and often, to discover the real performance issues. We measure relentlessly to identify bottlenecks and choose among alternate strategies, always favouring hard evidence over performance folklore. We use refactoring techniques and clean code principles to encapsulate performance-sensitive algorithms and keep the code base supple. Automated regression tests help us measure and track key performance areas as the system evolves.

System performance need not force us to abandon good development practices and search desperately for a performance super-hero to save the day at the last minute. By applying the same principles we've learned as agile developers, we can turn performance tuning from a nightmare into a competitive advantage.

Bio:
Mike Stockdale is the founder and principal software developer of Syterra Software (http://www.syterra.com). His focus is object-oriented development, automated testing and performance tuning of enterprise application software.

He wrote his first code in Fortran, on punched cards. Not too agile back then. He was introduced to agile by Gerard Meszaros in 2001. Along the way, he's been the up-front performance engineer, the last-minute performance super-hero and more recently, the agile developer doing performance tuning.
He works for a variety of large corporate and government clients and is also the lead developer for the open source projects FitNesse.NET
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/fitnessedotnet) and fitSharp (http://github.com/jediwhale/fitsharp).

Date:
January 5th, 2010 (Tuesday)

Time:
6:00 pm (Snacks and Socializing)
6:30-7:30 pm (Presentation)

Location:
ICT 121, University of Calgary Campus