From a software performance standpoint, “hot spots” are an area of intense activity. They’re hot spots because they’re frequently executed code paths with some sort of friction or bottleneck. They represent potential optimization paths for improving the performance of your code or design. You find the hot spots by measuring and analyzing the system.

Stepping back, we can use “Hot Spots” more loosely. We can use them to gather, organize, and share principles, patterns, and practices for performance.

I found an organizing frame for quality attributes (security, performance, … etc.) on SoftwareArchitectures.com and I think it’s helpful.  They organize quality attributes by the following:

Runtime system qualities
Non-runtime system qualities
Business qualities
Architecture qualities
Domain specific qualities.

Quality Attribute Frame
This table shows an example of some quality attributes organized by the Quality Attribute Frame

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Quality Attribute List

When thinking about quality, I tend to draw from the following quality attributes:

Availability
Buildability
Conceptual Integrity
Evolvability
Extensibility
Functionality
Implementation Transparency
Integrability
Interoperability
Maintainability
Performance
Portability
Reliability
Reusability
Scalability
Security
Serviceability
Subsetability
Supportability
Testability
Usability

Photo by mrkumm
While working on Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability (Patterns & Practices), my team created the software performance frame.  We used the performance frame to organize and prioritize software performance and scalability issues.  We used this frame throughout the guide to organize our guidelines and checklists.  We also used the performance frame to build evaluation criteria to help find key performance decisions that can have a large impact.
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We found that we could organize the majority of our performance principles, patterns and practices using …