Detecting Performance Regressions
by jeremylongshore
Automatically detect performance regressions in CI/CD pipelines by comparing metrics against baselines. Use when validating builds or analyzing performance trends. Trigger with phrases like "detect performance regression", "compare performance metrics", or "analyze performance degradation".
Skill Details
Repository Files
7 files in this skill directory
name: detecting-performance-regressions description: Automatically detect performance regressions in CI/CD pipelines by comparing metrics against baselines. Use when validating builds or analyzing performance trends. Trigger with phrases like "detect performance regression", "compare performance metrics", or "analyze performance degradation". version: 1.0.0 allowed-tools: "Read, Write, Edit, Grep, Glob, Bash(ci:), Bash(metrics:), Bash(testing:*)" license: MIT author: Jeremy Longshore jeremy@intentsolutions.io
Performance Regression Detector
This skill provides automated assistance for performance regression detector tasks.
Overview
This skill automates the detection of performance regressions within a CI/CD pipeline. It utilizes various methods, including baseline comparison, statistical analysis, and threshold violation checks, to identify performance degradation. The skill provides insights into potential performance bottlenecks and helps maintain application performance.
How It Works
- Analyze Performance Data: The plugin gathers performance metrics from the CI/CD environment.
- Detect Regressions: It employs methods like baseline comparison, statistical analysis, and threshold checks to detect regressions.
- Report Findings: The plugin generates a report summarizing the detected performance regressions and their potential impact.
When to Use This Skill
This skill activates when you need to:
- Identify performance regressions in a CI/CD pipeline.
- Analyze performance metrics for potential degradation.
- Compare current performance against historical baselines.
Examples
Example 1: Identifying a Response Time Regression
User request: "Detect performance regressions in the latest build. Specifically, check for increases in response time."
The skill will:
- Analyze response time metrics from the latest build.
- Compare the response times against a historical baseline.
- Report any statistically significant increases in response time that exceed a defined threshold.
Example 2: Detecting Throughput Degradation
User request: "Analyze throughput for performance regressions after the recent code merge."
The skill will:
- Gather throughput data (requests per second) from the post-merge CI/CD run.
- Compare the throughput to pre-merge values, looking for statistically significant drops.
- Generate a report highlighting any throughput degradation, indicating a potential performance regression.
Best Practices
- Define Baselines: Establish clear and representative performance baselines for accurate comparison.
- Set Thresholds: Configure appropriate thresholds for identifying significant performance regressions.
- Monitor Key Metrics: Focus on monitoring critical performance metrics relevant to the application's behavior.
Integration
This skill can be integrated with other CI/CD tools to automatically trigger regression detection upon new builds or code merges. It can also be combined with reporting plugins to generate detailed performance reports.
Prerequisites
- Historical performance baselines in {baseDir}/performance/baselines/
- Access to CI/CD performance metrics
- Statistical analysis tools
- Defined regression thresholds
Instructions
- Collect performance metrics from current build
- Load historical baseline data
- Apply statistical analysis to detect significant changes
- Check for threshold violations
- Identify specific regressed metrics
- Generate regression report with root cause analysis
Output
- Performance regression detection report
- Statistical comparison with baselines
- List of regressed metrics with severity
- Visualization of performance trends
- Recommendations for investigation
Error Handling
If regression detection fails:
- Verify baseline data availability
- Check metrics collection configuration
- Validate statistical analysis parameters
- Ensure threshold definitions are valid
- Review CI/CD integration setup
Resources
- Statistical process control for performance testing
- CI/CD performance testing best practices
- Regression detection algorithms
- Performance monitoring strategies
Related Skills
Attack Tree Construction
Build comprehensive attack trees to visualize threat paths. Use when mapping attack scenarios, identifying defense gaps, or communicating security risks to stakeholders.
Grafana Dashboards
Create and manage production Grafana dashboards for real-time visualization of system and application metrics. Use when building monitoring dashboards, visualizing metrics, or creating operational observability interfaces.
Matplotlib
Foundational plotting library. Create line plots, scatter, bar, histograms, heatmaps, 3D, subplots, export PNG/PDF/SVG, for scientific visualization and publication figures.
Scientific Visualization
Create publication figures with matplotlib/seaborn/plotly. Multi-panel layouts, error bars, significance markers, colorblind-safe, export PDF/EPS/TIFF, for journal-ready scientific plots.
Seaborn
Statistical visualization. Scatter, box, violin, heatmaps, pair plots, regression, correlation matrices, KDE, faceted plots, for exploratory analysis and publication figures.
Shap
Model interpretability and explainability using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). Use this skill when explaining machine learning model predictions, computing feature importance, generating SHAP plots (waterfall, beeswarm, bar, scatter, force, heatmap), debugging models, analyzing model bias or fairness, comparing models, or implementing explainable AI. Works with tree-based models (XGBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest), deep learning (TensorFlow, PyTorch), linear models, and any black-box model
Pydeseq2
Differential gene expression analysis (Python DESeq2). Identify DE genes from bulk RNA-seq counts, Wald tests, FDR correction, volcano/MA plots, for RNA-seq analysis.
Query Writing
For writing and executing SQL queries - from simple single-table queries to complex multi-table JOINs and aggregations
Pydeseq2
Differential gene expression analysis (Python DESeq2). Identify DE genes from bulk RNA-seq counts, Wald tests, FDR correction, volcano/MA plots, for RNA-seq analysis.
Scientific Visualization
Meta-skill for publication-ready figures. Use when creating journal submission figures requiring multi-panel layouts, significance annotations, error bars, colorblind-safe palettes, and specific journal formatting (Nature, Science, Cell). Orchestrates matplotlib/seaborn/plotly with publication styles. For quick exploration use seaborn or plotly directly.
