How to ensure ‘security’ and ‘performance’ during the development process?

In the context of software development, “features” are often the most visible deliverables. Users see pages, buttons, and interactions; management cares about whether it can be launched on schedule; internally, it’s just checking off requirement documents.

However, what truly determines a product’s longevity is often invisible to users: security and performance.

At GeekDance, we view security and performance as the product’s “intrinsic DNA”—they should not be an afterthought after feature release, but an integral part of the entire process from design and development to operation.

1. Why Features Often Overshadow Security and Performance

In most internet companies, security and performance are often sacrificed for three main reasons:

• Short-term drive: Features bring immediate visible results, while security and performance issues often appear later.
• Invisible cost: Conducting early security audits and performance optimizations is hard to quantify in terms of ROI.
• Lack of methodology: Without systematic processes and tool support, security and performance rely on last-minute overtime or pre-launch firefighting.

This results in fast product launches but poor reliability.

2. ESP Three-Layer Embedding Model: GeekDance Practice

1. Design Layer Embedding: Architecture as Security, Architecture as Performance

GeekDance has an experienced architecture team, and every new project undergoes rigorous architecture review:

• Security design: Data isolation strategies, access control, and sensitive data encryption are integrated in the design phase.
• Performance design: Cache strategies for high-concurrency scenarios, asynchronous queue design, and distributed architecture planning.
• Team collaboration: Architects, developers, QA, and security teams jointly review to ensure reliability is considered from the start.

Case: A GeekDance social app maintained stable response under millions of concurrent users, thanks to pre-planned asynchronous message queues and layered caching strategies during the architecture phase.

 

2. Development Layer Embedding: Security and Performance “Effective in Real-Time”

• CI/CD integration: Automated end-to-end static code scanning, dependency security checks, and performance baseline testing.
• Development standards: GeekDance enforces internal coding standards for security and performance; every code submission must pass automated checks.
• Performance budget: Set performance limits for each module to prevent code accumulation from degrading overall performance.

Case: While developing a companion management app for a smart hardware manufacturer, the team used CI/CD performance baseline alerts to detect response delays in the Bluetooth data sync module early.

 

3. Operation Layer Embedding: Monitoring, Retrospectives, and Continuous Optimization

• Real-time monitoring: Tracks response time, error rate, and resource usage, with alert mechanisms for quick anomaly response.
• Red-blue team exercises: Security team simulates attacks periodically to validate system resilience.
• Iteration retrospectives: Each iteration reviews not only feature delivery but also security and performance metrics.

3. Long-term Value: The Business Significance of Security and Performance

1. Reduce long-term costs

• Gartner research shows that fixing security and performance issues early in development costs ≈ 1/10 of fixing them after launch.

2. Enhance user trust

• Security protects user data, performance ensures smooth experience—together forming an “invisible brand value.”

3. Scalability and compliance

• Security and performance DNA provides the foundation for product expansion, supporting cross-industry and cross-market operations.

4. Trend Insight: The Next Battleground in Software Competition

Over the past decade, internet competition relied on feature differentiation; in the next decade, it will rely on reliability, stability, and security.

GeekDance’s observations and practices show:

• Users subconsciously choose more stable and secure products;
• Long-term competitiveness depends on the maturity of infrastructure and development processes, not on individual feature iterations.

5. GeekDance Team Advantages

1. Top-tier team composition

• Core members come from Alibaba, Tencent, Stanford, and other top institutions, deeply ingrained with engineering culture and product thinking. The technical service team has grown to over 100 members, providing end-to-end services from architecture design to operational support.

2. Ten years of technical accumulation

• Refined through thousands of projects, with rich experience in app development and hardware-software integration, especially creating unique solutions for overseas market expansion.

3. Proprietary development toolchain

• Internal CI/CD system automates security and performance checks; combined with overseas CDN nodes and multi-region deployment tools, it significantly improves cross-border project development efficiency.

4. Closed-loop service system

• Provides full lifecycle support from requirement analysis to operational launch, especially adept at handling overseas compliance and localized performance optimization.

5. Industry influence

• Team members share practices at domestic and international tech conferences, advancing industry-wide reliability standards.

With ten years of experience, GeekDance adheres to a result-oriented service philosophy: “Help enterprises succeed.” Whether it’s overseas app development, hardware-software integration, or complex enterprise systems, our top-tier team and mature methodology embed security and performance into the full product lifecycle.

Conclusion

Features are the surface; security and performance are the foundation.

Through the ESP Three-Layer Embedding Model, GeekDance builds security and performance into product DNA, ensured by experienced teams, toolchains, and closed-loop processes.

We believe: software’s true competitiveness lies not in how many features users see, but in how solid the unseen parts are.