Over 60% of IT Professionals Believe Speed-to-Market Pressure Impairs Software Quality
Online holiday shopping rush exposes widespread application performance and scalability
problems; projected jobless economic recovery likely to stretch IT teams further,
worsening software quality issues
Boston/Linz – December 15, 2009 – According to a recent survey of IT professionals
in the US, the UK and Central Europe, more than 90 percent of organizations experience
pressure to deliver software releases in unrealistic timeframes, while fully 62
percent believe that this pressure directly and negatively impacts the performance
and overall quality of the software they create.
Many pundits predict a jobless economic recovery in 2010 (For example, see ‘A
Jobless Recovery’ in The New York Times (Nov 11, 2009) by Casey B. Mulligan,
professor of economics at the University of Chicago). In this environment, IT and
software development organizations are under tremendous pressure to do more with
less. Applications of all kinds, particularly Web-based e-commerce applications,
are seen as engines of growth that can deliver the illusive combination of increased
revenue at a low cost. As a result, pressure to deliver new and improved releases
of applications is unrelenting. Almost two-thirds of the survey respondents cited
unrealistic lead times in delivering software as a problem of high or medium impact
in their organization.
For consumer-focused companies, deadlines imposed by the holiday shopping season
place a particularly acute strain on development and IT operations teams to create,
fix and update the applications their organizations rely on to turn a profit. Almost
half of the survey respondents report losing at least one day every week reproducing
and fixing performance and availability issues. This indicates a loss of hundreds
of hours that could otherwise be spent building new features to attract, engage
and retain customers. Aggressive application delivery deadlines don’t allow for
such innovation and inefficiency. As a result, the scramble to meet target dates
often results in lower-quality, slow-performing software that can disappoint end-users.
This can damage a brand and hurt a company’s bottom line. These challenges, noted
in a report
by Keynote Systems, observed that almost all leading retail sites slowed down on
Black Friday and some even had major outages.
According to Forrester Research, on average, companies that provide a superior experience
have 14.4 percent more customers who are willing to consider them for another purchase
than companies in the same industry that offer a poor customer experience. (Forrester
Research (September 4, 2009): “Best
Practices in User Experience (UX) Design”)
"App dev shops are under increasing pressure to deliver apps faster, but hasty application
development can result in lower quality,” said Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at
Forrester Research. “A poor user experience created by bugs or performance problems
in applications can be disastrous to a firm’s bottom-line."
Increasingly, companies are learning that application performance is the most important
determinant of the online experience, and that features and elegant user interfaces
cannot compensate for slow-loading Web pages.
Research from Google and Microsoft, released earlier this year, found that
performance issues resulting in delays as little as a half-second can distract users
and greatly impact business. The results of user performance tests, revealed at
the June 2009
Velocity Conference by Microsoft’s Eric Schurman and Google’s Jake Brutlag,
assess the aspect of performance that is most important – speed. The growing complexity
of today’s applications can lead to delays caused by poor performance, which their
research found not only distracts users, but can cause them to abandon sites altogether.
The survey, hosted by dynaTrace, a provider of application performance management
(APM) solutions, examined the challenges and costs associated with delivering scalable
and high-performing applications. Based on responses from almost 500 developers
and IT professionals, the study assessed the impact of new technical and organizational
trends that complicate efforts to ensure strong application performance and evaluated
the ability of organizations to deal with these new challenges.
About dynaTrace software Inc.
dynaTrace is the innovator and emerging leader in application performance management
(APM). The company offers the only continuous APM system on the market – one that
can monitor all transactions at all times and one that is used by all key contributors
to application performance – architects, development, test and production. Industry
leaders such as UBS, Salesforce.com, EnerNOC, Fidelity, and Thomson Reuters use
dynaTrace’s patent pending technology to gain deep visibility into application performance,
identify problems sooner and reduce the mean time to repair issues by 90%. Leading
companies rely on dynaTrace to proactively prevent performance problems from happening
and quickly resolve those that do occur – saving time, money and resources.
Contacts:
dynaTrace Software Inc.
Lisa Robinson Schoeller, +1781.768.4907
or
Klaus Fellner, +4373290820832