@deadcat said:
I'm reading through a spec for an enhancement of an existing asp.net system. It is already quite slow because of the sheer burden of all the business requirements.
I just came across this jem:
The performance of the system should as far as
possible be fast enough to avoid interrupting the users’ flow of thought.
I wonder how we benchmark how fast the users think. On the upside, the users are government employees, so I guess the system doesn't have to be too fast after all.
This is a common issue with performance requirements. I've asked our Product Manager how fast a particular financial function should be. His response was "uhm, fast?". This isn't entirely his fault either. In some systems, it isn't obvious what is fast enough. He doesn't know how long a 10 million iteration Monte Carlo simulation of a 25 year, quarterly Asian option should take. He just knows that users don't want to sit there staring at their screen for 45 minutes while our app chews CPU cycles and thrashes memory. He doesn't what it to be slow, but doesn't know how long it should really take. It is very technical as to why it takes a certain amount of time, and he doesn't want to impose an unreasonable requirement.
In this case though, I suspect that the writer of the requirement really wasn't sure of what he was talking about. Most performance specs are "make it, like, you know, fast!".
pedant mode ON
Isn't it gem?
pedant mode OFF