Scott Moore, a friend of mine from my days at Deloitte, is now a noted expert in application development testing, especially on HP and Mercury Interactive products. Scott has a new article up about "The Performance Authority" of a testing center of excellence. If you work at all with QA and software testing, then this is worth a read. This was mainly in response to the many inquiries he got about how to explain the highest level of maturity when it comes to addressing application performance issues in the software development lifecycle. Many of us have been seeing the slides around the maturity model for years, and we always see that the highest level – the Performance Authority – is always listed with a statement that it represents less than 1% of clients for companies like HP (especially Mercury Interactive). This statistic hasn’t changed in at least four years that anyone has seen or written about. Either companies are just not getting it, or HP and their partners are not telling clients how to get there, and more importantly what it would look like if they had such a thing as a "Performance Authority". This is Scott's take from years of studying various real clients of his and doing Center of Excellence assessments – the typical holes that he sees. Many companies are looking to achieve this level of maturity, and this article might give some clarity to what the “end game’ looks like. You can find the article online now at: http://www.loadtester.com/performanceauthority.php Enjoy, -Kevi
