Baking Performance Into the Life Cycle

Meyer has just posted about the need to add performance to early stages of the development live cycle, not just on latter tunning stages. To set it up, he proposes:

• Set objectives and measure.
• Performance modeling helps you design performance for your scenarios.
• Measuring continues throughout the life cycle and helps you determine whether you are moving towards your objectives.

Most of us actually do this to some extent. I certainly do it on most of my projects, but not in a continuous way. There's a high point of stress near the end of the implementation stage, prior to QA, a time on the live cycle traditionally stressed with a waterfall of changes. This is a stage on the development live cycle when we are stressed with costs and deadline, and performance is the first casualty to keep the iron triangle happy. Performance is, most of the times, the 1st functionality we can take away. We're not Microsoft, you know, we can't just take functionalities away and get away with it :)