BAWorld Winnipeg 2015 - Oct 7 - 9

The schedule for BA World Winnipeg 2015 taking place at the RBC Convention Centre from October 7th to 9th has just been released, and I have received notice that my seminar proposal has been accepted.

I will be presenting The Black Art of Performance Requirements for the Modern Web on October 8th at 2:15pm where I will be discussing the disconnect between what we believe the typical end user needs in terms of system performance, what they say they want, and what they actually need. This seminar is based upon a real-life case study and the contrast that it presented with "industry standards" for performance.

Some of the material is based upon a research paper that I presented at ICPE 2015 in Austin TX and is available online at the ACM Digital Library or MNP Media Library.

The complete session description is as follows:

Performance is a critical consideration in any project, many projects fail due to not only poor performance, but project teams that don’t give performance due consideration. Much of the reason is a lack of general understanding about how to define performance requirements, what makes a good performance requirement, and how to elicit co-operation to ensure they are met. The Black Art of Performance Requirements sheds light upon what end users want, what they think they want, and what they actually need. It examines the failings of industry standards, the reasons the results of industry studies fail to provide usable recommendations, and how to salvage value out of existing literature. High profile performance failures such as Healthcare.gov and Examsoft are neither accidental nor unavoidable. They are the result of failure to comprehend, failure to plan, and failure to commit to a set of defined performance requirements. Based on a real-world case study, The Black Art of Performance Requirements presents a process for defining SMART performance requirements in co-operation with business, developers, and analysts. Taking two years of production performance data and connecting with end-user performance complaints during that time frame, this session demonstrates the effectiveness of defining requirements using this process and explores how to objectively evaluate system performance against those requirements.

1. Understand why users don't understand performance requirements, and learn how to define quality SMART performance requirements that will satisfy them anyway.
2. Learn how to obtain buy-in from business, developers, and analysts for meeting performance targets and resolving performance problems.
3. Learn how to measure, evaluate, and compare performance results against targets objectively.

For more information about performance requirements, testing, and how to improve your chances at project success, please see MNP Consulting - Performance Management.