Automatic derivation of software performance models from CASE documents

Abstract

Lifecycle validation of software performance (or prediction of the product ability to satisfy the user performance-requirements) is based on the automatic derivation of software performance models from CASE documents or rapid prototypes. This paper deals with the CASE document alternative. After a brief overview of existing automatic derivation methods, it introduces a method that unifies existing techniques that use CASE documents. The method is step-wise clear, can be used from the early phases of the software lifecycle, is distributed-software oriented, and can be easily incorporated into modern (e.g., UML-based) CASE tools. The method enables the software designer with no specific knowledge of performance theory to predict at design time the performance of various final product alternatives. The designer does only need to feed the CASE documents into the performance model generator. The paper carries on an application case study that deals with the development of distributed software, where the method is used to predict the performance of different distributed architectures the designer could select at preliminary design time to obtain the best performing final product. The method can be easily incorporated into modern object-oriented software development environments to encourage software designers to introduce lifecycle performance validation into their development best practices.