Now here's the thing. You develop your latest greatest XYZ application. You follow good, sound, SE/CS design and development principles. You eshew optimisations in favour of simple, clear maintainability. You test, document and verify. Your application is mature--it just runs too slowly.

So now it is time to benchmark and optimise. But to do so, except for the most simple of applications, you have to dissect and re-write large parts of your application, re-write large parts of your test suite, and re-test and re-verify the whole darn thing.

The problem in this instance is not lack of optimisation. That's just a symptom. If I have to gut my application and start again because it turns out to be too slow then my development process is completely broken.

Performance requirements are part of the spec. I should be developing in small end-to-end increments so that I can continually look at whether my application is meeting performance requirements and optimise appropriately.

In reply to Re^3: Optimisation (global versus singular) by adrianh
in thread Optimisation isn't a dirty word. by BrowserUk

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