SPE Instructors

About the Instructors and Consultants

We bring you an unparalleled combination of expertise and experience in software performance engineering. Our instructors are uniquely qualified to teach you how to achieve performance excellence.

A Unique Combination of Expertise and Experience

L&S Computer Technology is at the vanguard of the development of software performance engineering techniques and tools and in their application. Dr. Connie U. Smith is a world-renowned leader in the theory and practice of SPE. She originated the SPE work in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, she and Dr. Lloyd Williams began a collaboration that lasted over 20 years to help clients solve software performance problems. They published numerous technical papers and articles, and are the authors of Performance Solutions: A Practical Guide to Creating Responsive, Scalable Software, published by Addison-Wesley. One of the keys to their success was their combination of practical performance expertise and software development experience.

Today, Lloyd is enjoying his retirement from software development and SPE. He is devoting more time to his photography passion. You can see his amazing work at www.lloydwphoto.com

Mark Smith is stepping in to cover the practical software development aspects in our courses, consulting, and tools. He comes from a software development background with hands-on skills in a broad range of technologies. He understands the reality of development pressures and its impact on performance engineering. He has successfully implemented countless systems that met performance requirements without extensive rework.

We are pleased to announce that Amy Spellmann is also supporting our consulting and teaching practice, and advising our strategic direction.

Dr. Connie U. Smith

Dr. Smith, a principal consultant of the Performance Engineering Services Division of L&S Computer Technology, Inc., is known for her work in defining the field of SPE and integrating SPE into the development of new software systems. Dr. Smith received the Computer Measurement Group's prestigious AA Michelson Award for technical excellence and professional contributions for her SPE work. She also authored the original SPE book: Performance Engineering of Software Systems, published in 1990 by Addison-Wesley, and approximately 100 scientific papers. She is the creator of the SPE·ED™ performance engineering tool. She has over 30 years of experience in the practice, teaching, research and development of the SPE performance prediction techniques.

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Dr. Smith first proposed the term software performance engineering in an award-winning 1981 paper. She was the founding Conference Chair of the International Workshop on Software and Performance (WOSP) in 1998, and has been a Program Committee member of all subsequent conferences. She heads the steering committee that directs the organization and content of future conferences.

She is a past ACM National Lecturer, served 8 years as an officer of ACM SIGMETRICS, and is an active member of the Computer Measurement Group, having served on the CMG Board of Directors for 4 years. She is listed in Who's Who of American Women and numerous other professional listings.

Dr. Smith received a BA in mathematics from the University of Colorado and MA and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Recent Publications

Conference Presentations

Amy Spellmann

Amy has over 25 years of hands on experience in performance engineering, infrastructure capacity planning, and modeling. She has worked with hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies, assisting them to efficiently manage their IT infrastructure while improving end-user response times. One of her specialties is coordinating with IT and business partners to ensure that applications and IT services meet service level agreements and performance requirements cost effectively. Amy’s technology focus over the last 8 years has been in Cloud and digital infrastructures · a holistic view of the entire service delivery stack from the business, application, IT, to facilities. Amy has worked with Performance Engineering Services Division over the last 5 years.

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Professional Experience

Amy is President and Principal of Optimal Innovations, a consulting company devoted to application performance engineering, Cloud and IT infrastructure capacity, power and space planning. At Optimal Innovations, she was founder and inventor of Green Capacity Planning, a holistic planning approach for today’s data centers that incorporates environmental considerations into traditional computer and network capacity planning.

Amy was previously Global Practice Principal for 451 Research Planning Advisors. She led the Technology Infrastructure Planning practice and served as lead and contributor in the Digital Infrastructure Roadmap practice. She has led numerous data center capacity planning projects including Digital Infrastructure Roadmap development. Most of her projects at 451 Research were focused on custom research and modeling for Cloud (public, hybrid, private), Mobile and Security systems.

In October 2010, Amy joined the Uptime Institute as a Principal in the Digital Infrastructure Services organization. At Uptime, she was one of the primary developers of the new Digital Infrastructure Roadmap service. The Digital Infrastructure Roadmap establishes an enterprise-wide understanding of the IT and data center facilities infrastructure requirements and delivers optimization focused recommendations and actions required to align the DIR with business requirements.

Amy was a key contributor at Hyperformix, Inc. where she served as Vice President of Performance Innovation. She led the development of HyPerformix’s Performance Engineering and Capacity Management services business; innovating, leading, and inspiring the methodologies, services, products and value of this technology-based company. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from Texas State University.

Professional Publications (Partial list)

Digital Experience Capacity Planning
The Languages of Capacity Planning: Business, Infrastructure & Facilities
Stack Metrics: A Taxonomy of Metrics Supporting the Capacity Planning Stack
Revolutionary Capacity Planning
Cloud Computing Cost Analysis
Leveraging the Cloud for Green IT
Predicting the Energy, Cost and Performance of Cloud Computing
Green Capacity Planning: Theory and Practice
Full Lifecycle Performance Engineering, Stepwise Refinement: A Pragmatic Approach for Modeling Web-based Applications
Server Consolidation

Professional Organizations

Computer Measurement Group, Director, Board of Directors
IEEE Contributer and author
Uptime Institute Certified Accredited Tier Specialist

Mark A. Smith

Mark has 15 years experience in software development and extensive experience in a wide variety of languages, databases, technologies, development approaches, and application domains. His experience includes work on systems in fields such as GIS, Web-based systems, business processes, networking, and software development tools and environments. He has extensive experience in GUI design and implementation. He is leading our R&D efforts on developing next generation tool support for SPE.

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Mark's Technical Expertise spans a broad range of technologies:

Programming Expertise: Java, Swing, AJAX, Javascript, CSS, Magik, Java Servlets, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Adobe Flex 2 and ActionScript 3, HTML/DHTML, XML/XSLT, JDBC, JDOM, J2EE, .NET, Visual Basic, C#, VBScript, MS VBA, ActiveX, ADO, COM+, SQL, PL/SQL, Apache, Tomcat, WebSphere, IIS, IE, Firefox, GIS and WMS APIs and Applications.

Database Expertise: MySQL, Oracle 9i, MS SQL Server, MS Access, Smallworld VMDS

Operating System Expertise: Windows XP, 2000, 9x, NT and 3.1, Linux, Mac OS, X Windows, Unix

Software Expertise: JBuilder, Eclipse, MS Visual Studio.NET, Rational ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Rose, TogetherSoft, MS Visual Source Safe, StarTeam, CVS, PLSQL Developer, XML Spy, IIS, Apache, Tomcat, WebSphere, eTest Suite, InstallShield, IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Smallworld Core GIS, SIAS/HCF, SI, Scout, PowerOn, PORD/POIC and SWWeb, AutoCAD, Photoshop, PC Anywhere, emacs

PerformanceEngineeringServices

About the Instructors and Consultants

A Unique Combination of Expertise and Experience

Dr. Connie U. Smith

Recent Publications

Conference Presentations

Amy Spellmann

Mark A. Smith

Performance
Engineering
Services