More and more companies are going agile, developing software in incremental, rapid cycles. This results in small incremental releases with each release building on previous functionality. Changes made in these incremental releases are continuously integrated with the existing code.
Testing is obviously very important in these agile environments to ensure that these frequent changes don’t result in errors. However, what we see is that in many cases the priority is on functional testing and not on ensuring the required level of performance.
As a result of this, every release might have a possible positive or negative impact on performance. These may be difficult to spot, even if you are looking for them.
Most performance degradations are not that easy to identify. They might not be noticeable at all hours of the day, only when the application is used on a slow connection or from a remote location with high latency. Because of this, it may take days or weeks before you become aware that something is not quite right and much longer before you have identified exactly what release has introduced the problem.
We’ve developed a way to track the changes that are being made to your website without compromising performance. By including the release number within your HTML, our Insights feature will recognize that information and add it to the measurement data. With three years of available data history, you can easily track the impact of each deployment.
The chart below demonstrates a performance degradation as well as increased Server and Load Balancer times. Because the server time increased, it’s clear that the decline in performance can be attributed to a change on the application side.
Using an on premise solution also allows you to benefit from this level of visibility even before going live with new changes. You can install the device in your own network where it can access your development and test environments. This provides valuable additional information to help you decide if a change is ready for production or not. It will also reduce the time spent on nightly troubleshooting and increase customer satisfaction.
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