13.6 Some Practical Issues in Performance Engineering
13.6.1 A General Comment
Software performance engineering is a subject that can be handled at many levels. For in-depth work, detailed knowledge of both tools and techniques is needed. Such topics are well beyond the scope of this book. Good material can be found in the texts by Connie Smith [SMI90], Raj Jain [JAI91], and Knepell and Arangno [KNE93]. Here, though, we'll limit ourselves to a brief outline of some important points.
The most important part of software performance engineering thing is not the modeling itself. It is to first establish:
- What do you want to do?
- Why do you want to do it?
- How the results will be used?
- Which modeling technique (or techniques) is best suited to the problem?
- How much it is going to cost in manpower, time, and money (a sensible budget is 5% of the project costs)?
Only when these points have been covered should a decision be made to develop performance...
