Software Performance Engineering Body of Knowledge
The SPE BOK is a guide used to plan, manage and communicate the key quality attributes of system and application performance, scalability and stability across the Enterprise. It also includes role descriptions and career path planning for practitioners. It is comprised of five knowledge areas, the underlying competencies and the tools and techniques required to deliver world-class services for software performance engineering.
The knowledge areas;
1) SA: SDLC and Architecture: This area defines the tasks and activities that are required during the SDLC to design and build applications that meet the business goals for performance and scalability. This area addresses how to capture non-functional requirements, design for them and build the application to meet those performance expectations.
2) PVT: Performance Validation and Testing: This area defines the performance testing process used to design, execute and interpret test results that are used to make informed business decisions. It is used to validate that key business transactions meet their service level objectives for the business workload.
3) CP: Capacity Planning: This area provides the processes and activities to monitor the current system utilization, workload forecasting based on the business goals, and future system utilization. As the business volume increases this KA addresses the workload forecasting and system resource utilization.
4) APM: Application Performance Management: This area focuses on monitoring the performance of complex applications. It provides processes that encompass monitoring real-user experience, discovery of the run-time application model, metrics for each application and components of the applications, and a performance database for analytics.
5) PRD: Problem Detection and Resolution: This area provides the processes and activities to enable the team to react quickly to production issues. It provides the approach to follow for triage and root-cause analysis..
The goal of the Body of Knowledge is to help define the profession of SPE and establish a common body of knowledge for the profession with well-defined knowledge areas. It is also to establish a common language for roles and responsibilities, define the competencies that support each KA and capture common techniques across the industries, as well as capture the unique performance challenges each industry faces.
The services we deliver are comprised of one or more of the knowledge areas.
