3 ms·

Performance should be part of the requirements!

lazide 4y ago
‘Should’ doesn’t pay the rent
mbreese 4y ago
It is... fintech normally choses good and fast (in this case fast == fast execution, not necessarily quickly delivered). That is to say -- not cheap.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  When your business is in the middle of financial transactions you have the privilege of picking fast, good, and expensive.
klabb3 4y ago
I agree. I'm claiming that most customers and/or decision makers do not. We should recognize that and focus on a solution instead of blaming engineers and local technical decision making. A first step is to avoid slow products, or influence those that buy products for us.
edanm 4y ago
Not in general, no. Performance is one thing that a user might care about, but there are dozens of others. Cost, how fast to build the software, etc. Telling users what they ought to want is not a very good idea.
- eru 4y ago
  No, no, performance should be part of the requirements. Not in the sense that every project needs awesome performance. But in the sense that requirements should not what performance goals are required. So you should note down target throughput and latency for different scenarios in your requirements. That can be as simple as saying that any user interaction should give feedback within one second. (Be that either doing what the user requested within that one second, or giving some indication that the program is working on it.)
  - edanm 4y ago
    Yeah with that I agree, part of the requirements can definitely be what performance is required. The way that GP comment was written though made it sound like good performance should be part of the requirements for all software, which is what I disagree with.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Why would a user care about how fast it was to build the software?
  - edanm 4y ago
    That depends on the user. As Joel Spolsky famously said, there are different spheres of software. Things like Word or Windows, which are general purpose and go out to millions at once, are one kind. On the other hand, lots of software is custom-built for a specific end-user. E.g. an organization's internal tooling. There, you can often sacrifice a lot of things for it to be done faster, depending on the use case. In that case, I consider the user to be the "organization" or specific people/teams within that organization.

‘Should’ doesn’t pay the rent

It is... fintech normally choses good and fast (in this case fast == fast execution, not necessarily quickly delivered). That is to say -- not cheap.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
When your business is in the middle of financial transactions you have the privilege of picking fast, good, and expensive.

klabb3 4y ago

I agree. I'm claiming that most customers and/or decision makers do not. We should recognize that and focus on a solution instead of blaming engineers and local technical decision making. A first step is to avoid slow products, or influence those that buy products for us.

edanm 4y ago

Not in general, no. Performance is one thing that a user might care about, but there are dozens of others. Cost, how fast to build the software, etc. Telling users what they ought to want is not a very good idea.

eru 4y ago
No, no, performance should be part of the requirements. Not in the sense that every project needs awesome performance. But in the sense that requirements should not what performance goals are required. So you should note down target throughput and latency for different scenarios in your requirements. That can be as simple as saying that any user interaction should give feedback within one second. (Be that either doing what the user requested within that one second, or giving some indication that the program is working on it.)
- edanm 4y ago
  Yeah with that I agree, part of the requirements can definitely be what performance is required. The way that GP comment was written though made it sound like good performance should be part of the requirements for all software, which is what I disagree with.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Why would a user care about how fast it was to build the software?
- edanm 4y ago
  That depends on the user. As Joel Spolsky famously said, there are different spheres of software. Things like Word or Windows, which are general purpose and go out to millions at once, are one kind. On the other hand, lots of software is custom-built for a specific end-user. E.g. an organization's internal tooling. There, you can often sacrifice a lot of things for it to be done faster, depending on the use case. In that case, I consider the user to be the "organization" or specific people/teams within that organization.