Application leaders must reduce technical debt and mitigate application performance risks. They should adopt a combined "shift left" and "shift right" performance engineering approach to build a highly productive software development organisation.

Many organisations still don't have such a holistic view of quality. Performance is one of the most critical nonfunctional characteristics of applications. Functional defects can typically be fixed relatively quickly and with comparatively little effort. Design flaws that impact performance are much harder to fix because they affect a larger number of features in different parts of the application. By testing early and often using test automation tools, development teams and stakeholders can remain aware of the current quality of the code and make informed decisions throughout the development cycle. 

Read more in this Gartner Research paper.