• Home
  • Areas of Application
  • About the Founder
    • Biography
    • Affiliations
    • Journal & Conference Publications
    • Patents
    • Invited Talks
  • Services
  • About the Company
    • News and Events
  • Interesting Links
  • Contact

Services

Education & Training
We offer the following courses. We can also customize our courses to suit your team's needs.

Consulting Services
​
 Our consulting services can be offered individually or in any combination.


​• Foundations of Performance  Engineering
The intended audience of our course on the foundations of performance engineering includes requirements engineers, architects, developers, testers, capacity planners, and their management. Topics include:
  • Performance engineering as a means of mitigating business and engineering risk
  • Performance metrics and performance requirements
  • Basic performance modeling
  • Performance measurement
  • Performance testing and analysis
  • Architecture and Scalability
  • Capacity management in production
  • Performance engineering in agile environments
  • Performance modeling study
  • Telling the performance story to different sets of stakeholders.

Other topics can be included on request.
This course can be taught at various stages of the software lifecycle. It can be taught at the beginning of a software project as a means of ensuring that all stakeholders are on the same page regarding performance concerns. If it is taught later in the project, material from the project itself can be used to illustrate course concepts, thus making them concepts immediately relevant and applicable to stakeholder concerns.
​

Course duration: three days.
• Performance Requirements Engineering
  and Practice for Product Managers
This course covers material on performance metrics and performance requirements drawn from the Foundations course. Its purpose is to give product managers the confidence to devise performance requirements that are quantifiable, verifiable, testable, and consistent, even when the performance needs of target market for a product are not clearly understood at the outset. Product managers who take this course will be able to communicate performance requirements to other stake holders in a form that can be supported by the implementation team and tested. This course will include exercises in performance requirement formulation.
​

Course Duration: one day

• ESTABLISHMENT OR IMPROVEMEnT of SOFTWARE
  PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING PROCESSES
We work with our clients to establish or improve performance processes. These can be part of a standard waterfall or V model software lifecycle, part of an agile process, or a combination of these. We work to ensure that performance requirements are carefully elicited and collected, and that these requirements are reflected in the architecture, design, implementation, and performance test planning.
• Diagnosis and Resolution of
​  Performance Issues
We have considerable experience with diagnosing the causes of performance issues through architecture reviews, understanding information flows, measurement, and the planning and review of performance tests. As a result, we have recommended remedial measures that our clients have successfully implemented.
• Performance-Oriented Architecture Reviews
We work with our clients to ensure maximum leverage of the software and hardware capabilities available to them and to prevent performance issues before a system is built. We evaluate existing and planned information flows and system structure to identify potential bottlenecks and performance anti-patterns. Identifying anti-patterns and concurrent programming issues is crucial, because they can lead to crashes whose cause may be extremely difficult to diagnose in the field or in the test lab.
• PERFORMANCE MODELING AND SIMULATION
We have considerable experience of using analytical modeling methods and discrete event simulation to answer performance questions and conduct what-if analyses. We have applied these methods to computer systems, telecommunications systems, call centers, and network management systems, network modeling, and many other areas.
• EVALUATION OF SYNERGIES BETWEEN
​  PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY ​
Performance improvements can result from architectural choices that improve reliability. Degradations in performance can indicate the presence of reliability problems.
  • Our work on database replication describes a method of improving reliability by suitably balancing the load among multiple hosts. [LINK or citation of paper by Bondi and Jin, 26].  
  • We structure performance tests to diagnose reliability problems [7].
In a prize-winning paper [Hyperlink to ABW2005 19], we showed how the onset of degraded response time or of another customer-affecting metric can be used to trigger software rejuvenation before a system fails. We also have experience of applying fault tree methods in conjunction with bug tracking and software testing processes to identify software components that are prone to failure. We have also considered the relationship between performance, reliability, and service continuity [Hyperlink to Baxter memorial lecture:9].
• SPECIAL TOPICS IN PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING
​On request, we can research and provide instruction on special topics in performance engineering according to the client’s needs. These can be related to technologies of interest and to specific domains of application.
• DUE DILIGENCE ABOUT PERFORMANCE ​
We provide performance assessments of systems as part of due diligence exercises. These exercises might take place as part of the process for procuring a software product, or as part of a merger, acquisition, or other form of investment. For example, a venture capital investor may wish to assess the performance of a company’s product or of the company’s performance engineering capabilities,  because poor performance is usually a leading risk to the success of the product. Depending on client needs, we assess the ability of a system to meet the client’s performance requirements and the quality of performance engineering activities related to the system, such as workload characterization, performance requirements engineering, architecture, performance testing, and monitoring.
• SUPPORT OF INNOVATION
Some of the solutions we have developed to address our clients’ performance issues have been patentable or publishable.  On at least one occasion, our clients have successfully applied for patents on intellectual property after we identified it as being patentable.
• EXPERT WITNESS SERVICES TO EVALUATE PATENTS
​  AND OTHER INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Our founder has been awarded U.S. patents, either as the sole inventor or as a co-inventor.  This and his research and consulting experience equip him to provide expert services for the evaluation of patents and other intellectual property and to help determine whether infringements have occurred.

Picture
About the Founder
Picture
The Founder's Book
Picture
Areas of Application
© Andre B. Bondi – 2017
  • Home
  • Areas of Application
  • About the Founder
    • Biography
    • Affiliations
    • Journal & Conference Publications
    • Patents
    • Invited Talks
  • Services
  • About the Company
    • News and Events
  • Interesting Links
  • Contact