Poor Performance - Your Fault?

Who is to blame for bad application performance? by Alois Reitbauer is an informative look at how developers, system architects, testers, R&D managers, and operations leaders can each play a role in poor performance of software.

While pointing the finger is a common way employees in companies invest their time, rarely does it have much ROI. My experience is that development teams, IT departments, and company executives usually don't play together very well. They don't communicate clearly or frequently to each other. It's only natural because they have their own jobs to do, and their job evaluation (i.e. bonus or raise) isn't measured by collaboration.

In order to reduce or eliminate the blame game, cultures must change. It must be made a culture thing to have everyone accept that they play a key role in the performance of the end product. When companies get smarter and create a culture where everyone wants to have high-performance software applications, then much of the blame game will disappear. A bad habit is replaced with a good habit.

Working together throughout the entire product lifecycle is the best way to make the software faster, smoother, more reliable, and more scalable.

My recommendation is to skip the blame game. Begin going out of your way to drop by a colleague's cubical and ask about how their piece is performing. Offer to help. Encouraging all of the people around you to think about performance may feel uncomfortable at first, and some may treat you with a bit of skepticism at first, but keep at it. Soon you will be viewed as the person in the company that is sincerely concerned about speed and scalability.

Would it be so bad to be nicknamed "The Performance Czar"? I would gladly take that geek name and wear it with pride.