I have had a number of calls around "We have an application, not built yet, but we want to know if we have enough capacity and/or will the application scale/perform in our environment."
My analogy to this is the following. Someone shows me the blueprint to a Formula 1 (or NASCAR) race car. They ask me "will this car win the race?"
While the car being proposed may have all the right components (wheels, engine, gearbox, etc) there are other unknown variables that determine if the car can win a race. Without extensive testing there's no way to know if all the components are assembled correctly nor if they are configured to work together in optimal manner (performance tuned).
Related to this is the ability of the car to both get off the starting line and finish the race (a prerequisite for winning). Again, there are a number of variables that impact this. First is some catastrophic failure in one of the components. Then there is the skill of the car's driver. Then the other drivers on the same racetrack and crashing into our car.
There is simply no way to predict if the car can win much less finish a race.
The same attitude has to be taken when planning your production IT environment. You can't predict behaviour. You can, on the other hand, conduct stringent system integration and performance testing in order to see if your application will (or will not) perform as expected in production.
This is why everyone should test as early in the development cycle as possible. I was working with one application that had been in production for several months with constant, recurring failures. There were fundamental application design problems in how the application was developed. It took us four more months to fix those design problems and get the final, new version of the application into production. Don't put off testing. Do it right. Do it early. Test early. Test often. That is the key to success in production.
My analogy to this is the following. Someone shows me the blueprint to a Formula 1 (or NASCAR) race car. They ask me "will this car win the race?"
While the car being proposed may have all the right components (wheels, engine, gearbox, etc) there are other unknown variables that determine if the car can win a race. Without extensive testing there's no way to know if all the components are assembled correctly nor if they are configured to work together in optimal manner (performance tuned).
Related to this is the ability of the car to both get off the starting line and finish the race (a prerequisite for winning). Again, there are a number of variables that impact this. First is some catastrophic failure in one of the components. Then there is the skill of the car's driver. Then the other drivers on the same racetrack and crashing into our car.
There is simply no way to predict if the car can win much less finish a race.
The same attitude has to be taken when planning your production IT environment. You can't predict behaviour. You can, on the other hand, conduct stringent system integration and performance testing in order to see if your application will (or will not) perform as expected in production.
This is why everyone should test as early in the development cycle as possible. I was working with one application that had been in production for several months with constant, recurring failures. There were fundamental application design problems in how the application was developed. It took us four more months to fix those design problems and get the final, new version of the application into production. Don't put off testing. Do it right. Do it early. Test early. Test often. That is the key to success in production.
