The product lifecycle performance support service is a comprehensive set of performance analysis activities that benefit your product at every stage of its development. When FrontRunner joins a project, your development team becomes more effective in many ways:
The first step to a successful development effort is to set clear, verifiable objectives. For system performance, this includes selection of appropriate metrics and realistic workloads. FrontRunner CPC works with your product architects, marketing team, and even key customers to set realistic and relevant performance goals. Once performance goals are in place, developers have a clear target and are less likely to introduce bottlenecks or over-optimize a component whose performance is already adequate.
FrontRunner's approach to performance analysis emphasizes early predictive modeling and seeks to detect performance bottlenecks as quickly as possible. Often, a simple model combined with unambiguous performance goals exposes design flaws that can be quickly rectified before wasting time on detailed design or coding.
Often the best architecture for a new product is not immediately apparent. FrontRunner's proactive modeling makes it easy to compare the performance of several alternative designs.
FrontRunner can augment performance models with an availability model that shows how different assumptions about failure modes, failure rates and recovery time determine overall system availability. For example, in many highly available systems, down time to upgrade software is the dominant factor in total availability.
Often developers have questions about performance or want to know the most efficient way to implement a certain function. Frontrunner concentrates on performance, so we quickly address performance issues in the overall context of the project, while the developer doesn't have to spend a long time figuring out an answer. Frontrunner consultants have extensive experience supporting developers in a variety of settings.
Not all components of a new product require an equal depth of analysis. Most components are not bottlenecks, and simple analysis may be sufficient to demonstrate the component has adequate performance. FrontRunner's emphasis on predictive modeling means these not-critical components are quickly identified. This leaves more time to work on the few critical components that may need optimization and/or a more detailed analysis.
With FrontRunner concentrating on performance concerns, your key development and test personal are free to concentrate on other issues.
There is an extensive variety of simulation software available. These are complex and powerful tools with a step learning curve, and often substantial costs. FrontRunner has experience with several leading simulation tools and can select the one that's right for your project. Because FrontRunner holds the license, builds the models, and runs simulation experiments, your project benefits from the extensive performance data provided by simulation without the effort and expense of setting it up. Should your organization later decide to purchase its own license, FrontRunner can provide a working model of your product, and assistance in familiarizing your staff with their simulation tool of choice.
There are many subtleties in planning and conducting performance benchmarks that are not present in conventional functional testing, so FrontRunner CPC's experience and expertise can ensure that your performance tests are both valid and useful. Assistance can range from advising your test team to completely outsorcing the benchmarking effort.
The utility of performance data does not end once a product ships. If your customers will use your product in a variety of ways, they will have questions about its capacity for their application. FrontRunner can answer these questions directly, as well as help you develop an infrastructure for answering them.
By working with FrontRunner CPC, your team is exposed to a variety of modern performance analysis techniques. In addition, FrontRunner can provide explicit training on a variety of topics related to performance. If your organization is engaged in process improvement for SEI, ISO, or Baldridge certification, FrontRunner can advise on how to include performance analysis in your development process.
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