Hewlett-Packard White Paper Sample

All too often, there is a big difference between how it performs in pre-production testing than how it performs in the production environment. The root of the problem is that there is little or no collaboration among pre-deployment development and QA teams and the operations group that manages the production rollout.

Each group views its role as a series of independent and discrete tasks. For example, development may focus on validating performance, testing usage scenarios, and pinpointing performance issues, while operations may focus on meeting service-level agreements (SLAs), measuring availability levels, and addressing configuration issues. ITIL v3 recognizes that some tasks are essential throughout the whole lifecycle process and highlights the need to include service level requirements in the design and testing phase.

But how do developers know what usage scenarios to test if they don’t have visibility into real, end-user behavior? Tools can now track and capture actual user application behavior, such as click-stream traffic, page performance, application error, and visitor sessions on Web-based applications—but if the information gained from these tools is not shared across the application lifecycle, the value is limited at best.

Likewise, if your production team lacks the application knowledge to repeat the conditions that cause performance problems and isolate performance problems in a controlled manner, the lack of collaboration costs you time, money, and talent. Costs are wasted on both sides of the wall—money that you can save by sharing resources.