Leveraging the Crowd: How 48,000 Users Helped Improve Lync Performance

Performance is a critical component of customer satisfaction with network-based applications. Unfortunately, accurately evaluating the performance of collaborative software that operates in extremely heterogeneous environments is difficult with traditional techniques such as modeling workloads or testing in controlled environments. To evaluate performance of an application in the wild during development, the authors deployed early versions of the software, collecting performance data from application users for key usage scenarios. The analysis package they used produces visualizations to help development teams identify and prioritize performance issues by focusing on performance early in the development cycle, evaluating progress, identifying defects, and estimating timelines.