Dev Days: Discover how to map interaction between applications and networks

With time-to-market pressures and heightened performance expectations driven by business leaders, software developers are expected to produce applications that perform well the first time.

While Service Level Management solutions provide application performance metrics, which in turn enable the business units to hold IT accountable for consistent performance and reliability, there remains a further issue that developers must address - or for which they must be prepared to be held responsible.

That issue is the complex interaction between production network environments and application behaviour, and says Richard Hepplestone, product manager at Compuware Corporation SA. "This can prove to be a complex issue to understand with potentially damaging effects if not managed correctly."

"With powerful development platforms available for building networked applications, it is essential that IT operations and developers consider how an application will behave in a distributed environment," he says.

"Often though, development testing only occurs on a LAN, where bandwidth is nearly unlimited, and latency is inconsequential," he explains. "However, bandwidth and latency become real issues when applications are taken into wide area network (WAN) environments, a common situation in South Africa where companies typically have offices in geographically remote centres."

At Microsoft`s Developer Days, Compuware demonstrated a solution to this commonly faced challenge. Its Application Expert technology enables IT professionals to ensure production readiness in terms of bandwidth requirements and the effect of the application on existing and projected WAN traffic.

Hepplestone continues: "Before deployment, development teams must answer important questions such as: What will happen to the application when deployed over the network? How do we ensure the application meets end user needs? Will my new application work on existing WAN infrastructure, is more bandwidth required? Unless these questions are satisfactorily answered with facts and accurate measurements, application developers are taking a big risk that the application they are producing will not perform or function as the user needs it to in the live environment. This could have large cost implications if the application needs to be re-developed. "

He says Application Expert`s WAN Provisioning Module (WPM) focuses on the dominant network budget metric: WAN bandwidth. "It enables you to understand the effect of new applications on existing infrastructure within a particular remote office."

The technology also provides in-depth views of what happens at each stage of an application`s operation over a network with a report template that enables users to summarise how application performance changes for each revision of the application.

"Application development has to be a predictable and dependable process. Unforeseen problems or unexpected surprises typically result in project delays and expensive overruns. With its suite of products that complement Microsoft`s Visual Studio .Net development environment, Compuware is helping developers around the world to improve productivity and deliver better applications every day," Hepplestone concludes.