Drive by performance testing

Typically the performance tests are run by a specialist who runs his tests for a day, sends his report and then drives away. And you, the poor developer are left with a plot chart illustrating some weird performance issue you haven’t the slightest idea what is causing it.

Now it doesn’t have to be like that. Just be prepared!

Use performance monitoring in your code

Add measurement into the important parts of your code and enable seeing the reports in runtime. I have used Jamon in Java development with great success.

Run your own performance tests

By running your own tests you can fix all the silly mistakes before the official tests are run. Focus on covering the critical parts of your application.

Participate in the official performance testing

If you have proper monitoring in place you should be able to analyze and fix the issues as they are found. It is also the only way to analyze the really weird ones.