Software Performance Evaluation using UML-Ψ (PSI)

Abstract

Predicting the performance of software architectures during early design stages is an active field of research in software engineering. It is expected that accurate predictions minimize the risk of performance problems in software system. This would improve quality and save development time and cost of bug fixing in the later stages. SPE (Software Performance Engineering) and UML-Ψ (PSI) are among those methods which are used for performance prediction and helping the software architect to catch performance bottlenecks early. SPE is a relatively mature approach and makes use of execution graphs and message sequence charts for the system’s representation. On the other hand, UML-Ψ uses Use Case, Activity and Deployment diagrams for the system’s representation. Use Case diagrams correspond to workloads applied to the system. Activity diagrams provide a high-level description of the computation steps performed by the system, and Deployment diagrams describe the physical resources on which the computations take place. This thesis presents the research aimed at using UML-Ψ together with SPE. This is done by implementing a performance analysis example in these two methods. One of the contributions in the thesis is the definition of translation mechanism devised to facilitate the translation from SPE models and UML-Ψ models. However, only a subset of SPE models is considered during the thesis. Another contribution is done by identifying some improvements with respect to the uml modeling tools to increase the worth of UML-Ψ. The results presented in the thesis show how to use UML-Ψ with SPE by properly translating the models from one form to another.