By Cat Yong
When application failure happens in the production stage, it is 150 times more expensive to fix it, than when it is during the application development stage, according to Dynatrace’s Performance Advocate, Andreas Grabner.
Having 15 years of experience in the Java and .NET space, Grabner finds out why applications break down, teasing out the possible underlying reasons from the browser level all the way to the database level.
This knowledge becomes useful as Grabner has observed a number of companies making the transition to mobile application development in the last few years.
“Whether they are online retailers or mobile service providers or e-commerce providers… they need to take app development very seriously,” he said. “Especially smaller companies can distinguish themselves by building something right, from scratch.”
In essence, what Dynatrace wants to propose is proactive steps for application development and thinking about performance right from the beginning of the whole process.
Spray and pray – Startup pitfalls
A statistic to think about, is that 84-percent of mobile apps on the Google and Apple app stores, are used once and then deleted. The user experience of these apps are usually so bad that they are deleted immediately and given a bad review.
Loss of conversion to clicks or sales, becomes the least of companies’ worries.
The app development scene is getting worse now also, because they are just so many more applications coming out right now, and companies cannot afford to have a bad experience tied to their brand.
According to Dynatrace’s ASEAN Director, Koh Eng Kiong said, “Performance is usually a piece that is missing until ‘something’ happens. It has to be incorporated into the app development process, and not just aesthetics.”
This is a ‘trap’ he observed, smaller startups tend to fall into. “They build something that works right now and (put off) building the bigger thing later. But often they grow too fast, and it’s too late.”
A lot of organisations also tend to approach Dynatrace, after problems have occurred and they are at their wits’ end, having already upgraded everything they could think of – infrastructure, processing power, bandwidth, memory and so on.
Grabner cautioned, “There are many things to consider when building software. Building applications is easy, but often, developers are not good architects.
“They need to put certain architectural rules in place. Even something small you need to think about how it can scale, how you can add the next features to it, and so on!”
Dynatrace’s application performance monitoring (APM) solution, claims to be able to not just fix the problem, but also capture details about it – everything that happens from user to the infrastructure to the code to the third party service in a virtualised or not environment – and loop it back, with a tool called Pure Path.
“The key thing is not to do just firefighting, but also feedback information for developers and testers so mistakes do not happen anymore,” Grabner concluded.
