The Performance Engineering Book of Nonsense: A Tale of the Tardy, in Limericks

When a CEO in a faraway land decides to give her customers slicker, quicker applications, her IT shop adopts "established" practices to have the system designed, built and tested. Battle-scarred IT veterans will find this tongue-in-cheek narrative evoke a strong sense of déjà vu, and will discover unusual insights into why things invariably go wrong in the slippery world of performance engineering. Not just for IT professionals: the chapter endnotes (in verse) allow readers from diverse backgrounds to enjoy this unique collection of limericks. Cover: Personification of the sixth order Koch curve, a self-similar pattern. Self-similar patterns are common in the real world. Traffic at high volume web sites is known to exhibit high levels of self-similarity.

Ramkumar Ramaswamy is co-founder of Performance Engineering Associates (www.pea-online.com), a consulting firm that specializes in scientific, quantitative techniques for performance engineering of IT systems. He received his PhD in Operations Research from the Indian Institute of Management and has nearly two decades of IT industry experience, playing strategic and not-so-strategic advisor to several large corporations worldwide. Inspired by Edward Lear's "The Book of Nonsense," this is his maiden foray into limericks.