Survey: Speed (to Market) Kills

ore than 90 percent of companies feel pressure to deliver software releases in unrealistic timeframes, while 62 percent believe that this pressure negatively affects the performance and quality of the software they create, according to a new survey of almost 500 software developers and IT professionals.

Many economists predict the so-called jobless recovery will continue in the new year. In this environment, IT and software development groups are under intense pressure to do more with less. Applications of all kinds, particularly Web-based e-commerce applications, are seen as engines of growth that can deliver the illusive combination of increased revenue at a low cost.

As a result, pressure to deliver new and improved releases of applications is unrelenting. Almost two-thirds of the survey respondents cited unrealistic lead times in delivering software as a problem of high or medium impact in their company. The survey was conducted by dynaTrace, a provider of application performance management solutions.

For consumer-focused companies, deadlines imposed by the holiday shopping season place a particularly acute strain on development and IT operations teams to create, fix, and update the applications their organizations rely on to make a buck. Almost half of the survey respondents report losing at least one day every week reproducing and fixing performance and availability issues. This indicates a loss of hundreds of hours that could otherwise be spent building new features to attract, engage, and retain customers. Aggressive application delivery deadlines don't allow for such inefficiency.

As a result, the scramble to meet target dates often results in lower-quality, slower software that can disappoint users. This can damage a brand and hurt a company's bottom line. Retail sites, in particular, have been known to slow to a crawl at times during this season, particularly on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday."

According to Forrester Research, on average, companies that provide a superior experience have 14.4 percent more customers who are willing to consider them for another purchase than companies in the same industry that offer a poor customer experience.

"App dev shops are under increasing pressure to deliver apps faster, but hasty application development can result in lower quality," stated Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "A poor user experience created by bugs or performance problems in applications can be disastrous to a firm's bottom-line."

Increasingly, companies are learning that application performance is the most important determinant of the online experience, and that features and elegant user interfaces cannot compensate for slow-loading Web pages. Research from Google and Microsoft, released earlier this year, found that performance issues resulting in delays of as little as a half-second can distract users and greatly impact business.

The results of user performance tests, revealed at the June 2009 Velocity Conference by Microsoft's Eric Schurman and Google's Jake Brutlag, assess the aspect of performance that is most important -- speed. The growing complexity of today's applications can lead to delays caused by poor performance, which their research found not only distracts users, but can cause them to abandon sites altogether.

DynaTrace's survey examined the challenges and costs associated with delivering scalable and high-performing applications. It was based on responses from almost 500 developers and IT professionals in the U.S., UK. and Central Europe.