It's a familiar story. Large project, mantras of "subsecond response times are vital to the business," thousands of $$ spent on requirements tools, profiling tools, performance test tools. Armies of script writers and testers, supplied by test outsourcers wearing ISO or CMM L5 badges. Performance tuning experts of every hue and color. Yet, fingers cross at the time of a performance test. Finally they uncross after a battle, only to cross again at the time of deployment, at which point eyebrows furrow with, "why should a successfully-performance-tested app have to act sluggish after deployment?" Do the tools, the armies and the badges do justice to the very specialized technical and quantitative area of PE, or do they merely institutionalize the cowboy approach? Perhaps you need to look closely at how scientific and rigorous your PE practices really are.

PEA works with the client organization in conducting independent third-party audits for projects where performance is a crucial factor. We have two flavors of audits tailored for two broad categories of organizations.

Type 1. Validatory Audits

Much has been said and written about the importance of independent audits in an outsourcing context. This category of audits caters to organizations who have outsourced their business-critical IT system for which performance is an important factor, and are looking for a highly qualified and experienced firm to do an independent third-party audit of the project at the vendor's end. The objective of the audit is to elicit any risks in meeting the performance expectations, guarantees or SLAs.

Type 2. Bootstrap Audits

This category of audits caters to IT organizations who have taken on the task of delivering a performance-intensive, business-critical IT system and are looking at de-risking the project from a performance perspective. With PEA's specialized expertise in the area, we can help you evaluate the risks in meeting the system's performance expectations or guarantees, and identify weak areas that need to be handled appropriately.

How We Work

Our independent audits begin at the beginning - by understanding the business and technology objectives of the engagement, and understanding the key stakeholders. The audit's underlying objective is to determine the extent to which scientific approaches are used to engineer a performant system. With this in mind, we do a sampled risk assessment of the project by studying, amongst other things, the following:

• Whether the right statistical approaches have been used to translate business requirements to a workload model that can form a rock-solid basis for capacity planning, testing and beyond.
• How proofs-of-concept are designed, executed and their results interpreted.
• How performance test cases are designed and executed, and whether the results are scientifically and rigorously interpreted as well as extrapolated.

The crucial nature of these engagements mandates a high degree of expertise in the area of PE. Every audit is conducted by both PEA partners who collectively bring in over three decades of IT experience. Most audits deliver eye-openers in as little as 2 business days.