How can I sell non-functional testing tool to my company?

Question

I need to present performance test tool to management team of my company. Some of them think performance testing is not necessary for us because our customer never request or give requirement about performance to us.

However one of our current big project found performance problem, responding time is very long, server down when it handle many concurrent user.

I think I need to prepare myself to present about it benefit both concrete and non-concrete. Anyone have experience with performance testing tool? How it can empower your productivity?

Answer 1

Management cares about money. Show them how your tool will save them money and you will get their approval. Everything is usually trivial to them.

Answer 2

It sounds like you haven't used profilers yourself. That would be a good start. You didn't mention your environment but red-gate makes a wonderful profile for .NET.

http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_performance_profiler/index.htm

Whatever environment you're in, you can probably find a decent profiler with a trial period. Use the trial period to profile your app and get to know how profilers work and how they can help make your app better.

One thing to demonstrate about productivity is how they can let you focus on the biggest bottlenecks and have the most impact on improving performance with the least effort. With a good profiler you won't bother optimizing code that is already performant.

Of course, if your company really don't care about performance they won't want you doing any optimization anyways. There are lots of companies like this and it stinks.

Answer 3

I think performance is one of the trivial cases that is really difficult to present to someone else especially the management. You should have some "Clear" plus "simple" way to show the use of it.

I have the experience with profilers like JBuilder and YourKit but no other performance tools. But I think the "Numbers" shown on them are not sufficient to show the use for them.

If you can build a nice practical example it would be great. Show same case for both scenarios. If you can show that the old one's response time is large and after performance improving the same operation takes much less time then it is a good way to prove your claim.

Answer 4

Expanding on what @LWoodyiii had to say. When presenting a case for anything, whether that be hiring more people, or investing in a performance testing tool (or outsourcing your performance testing for that matter), it needs to be presented in terms of money saved. By doing a little leg work, you should be able to back into the $ saved amount.

If you had never had any performance problems, then it would be more difficult to quantify $ saved. But in your case, it should be a little easier to figure this out, as you have already had some significant performance issues. You should be able to put a $ amount to your existing performance problem. You should be able to quantify the revenue lost (lost transactions, lost customers, decreased transaction throughput, etc...) due to the degradation of service. You can also factor in costs associated with fixing and resolving the performance issue. Then it is a matter of comparing the costs of having performance problems vs implementing a performance testing program (tool, training and resource costs).

It also probably would not hurt to spice up the presentation with some anecdotal performance horror stories that were well publicized in the news and how much those outages cost those firms.