There are many test companies on the market today, each one with their own specialties, going from unit test to functional and load tests.  Our view is that all of then are extremely important, but is fundamental that during those tests, the capture of the actual behavior of the methods, components and business transactions can be done, in a way that the anticipation the possible problems that can jeopardize the performance of the application when in Production can be fixed.

Our proposal is to complement those tests with the simultaneous monitoration of then, so several products of this effort can be shown, that means a lot of investment in people, hardware and software.  Some examples of this complimentary monitoration are the performance reports, errors, security, identification of the behavior for each component and etc…

This approach create a strong analysis base to support the decision of promotion the application to Production in a very consistent way, and with a performance expectation very close to the actual reality will be. From this point, there is a very clear identification of components that will be critical when more load is added to the application, allowing the necessary adjusts to guarantee the the SLA´s.

Inside ITIL, there is a discipline called Business Activity Monitoring, that focus exactly the behavior of the application from the business point of view.  This discipline is directly linked to de performance and dependency that the application has from the environment where lives.  We know that almost everywhere the tests and stage environment is not even close to similar to the production´s, and it create a big problem problem because when the application is tested in the tests and stage environment, it´s runs alone, using alone all the resources, and when in production it must share and compete for the very same resources with other applications and etc…  and this approach is compatible with all the development and tests methodologies in the market.