Application performance testing and management

There is an interesting article on application performance management at CBR.

It starts with the sad fact that:

"for all of the advice that has been offered over the years by analysts, vendors and even the media, only an estimated 20% of companies have automated their software testing processes. "

The article is not about automated software testing and covers comments from leading vendors in the applications management and optimisation arena, such as Mercury Interactive and Compuware. It concludes:

"There is a great deal of logic in the goal of more proactive applications management. So much so, in fact, that Mercury now talks about the importance of the 'application performance lifecycle'. Historically it may have been good enough simply to fix application problems after a customer or employee complaint, but a more proactive approach is likely to save both of those groups a lot of unnecessary inconvenience - and help get the IT department out of fire-fighting mode. As a next step, feeding application performance metrics post-production into the development function and vice versa could help companies to see the benefit of 'closed loop' application performance management."