AlwaysOn.biz helps its customers successfully support their business objectives by getting the best out of their software and hardware investments. We are Software Performance Engineers who specialize in the WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) space. Our methodology supports the application lifecycle from “inception to retirement” since we believe this approach provides the most value to the business by reducing the risks associated with the creation and continued support of the mission critical applications.

Since our team has performed each function in the application lifecycle; we understand where the gaps are in the process and can eliminate most of the risks associated with software development. The figure below illustrates these functions and how Software Performance Engineering brings them together.

Since we believe each function is critical to a successful application launch each group needs to be integrated into a cross-functional team to be successful. This process begins from the inception phase where we leverage simulation technology to validate the architectural design prior to commitment to full scale software development. The sooner problems are resolved in the application development lifecycle the less costly the resolution is.

Throughout the application construction phase we revalidate the application design and implementation to determine if the software will scale to meet the established Service Level Agreements (SLAs) provided by the Requirements Team. If we find issues with how the code is designed we discover these problems with very targeted load test and the appropriate instrumentation. Since we know the WBI software, we don’t have to waste time looking in the wrong places.

After the application has been certified for a Production deployment we repurpose our load scripts and monitors into the Production environment. Utilizing these work products enables the Production Support Team to have an effective management solution from the first day of deployment. It also gives them the visibility into the application to understand potential problems and take proactive measures to stabilize the application before problems become visible to the end users.

After the release has been deployed into Production we work with the Production Support Team to capture the relevant metrics to validate our simulation model that was created from our earlier work during the Testing phase. With this simulation model we can project the system behavior (response times and resource use) when new users are transitioned to the new application in a phased rollout.

What we have briefly described here is an application lifecycle approach to software development that significantly reduces performance related risks. We understand this space because we have lived it and have the experience and expertise to facilitate the process with the various stakeholders in the organization. This will become evident as you read the remaining sections of our web site where we illustrate our successes.