Performance Planning

Typical user feedback includes

statements like the following:

■ "The online performance is so bad that it prevents my staff from doing their jobs."

■ "The billing run takes too long."

■ "When I experience high amounts of Web traffic, the response time becomes

unacceptable, and I am losing customers."

■ "I am currently performing 5000 trades a day, and the system is maxed out. Next

month, we roll out to all our users, and the number of trades is expected to

quadruple."

Some real business goals for these typical user statements might be:

■ "The billing run must process 1,000,000 accounts in a three-hour window."

■ "At a peak period on a Web site, the response time will not exceed five seconds for

a page refresh."

■ "The system must be able to process 25,000 trades in an eight-hour window."