Performance evaluation approaches for software architects

Performance analysis techniques have already been developed for decades. As software architecture research has matured, performance analysis techniques have also been adapted to the evaluation of software architectures. However, the performance evaluation of software architectures is not yet systematically used in the industry. One of the reasons may be that it is difficult to select what method to use. The contribution of this work is to define a comparison framework for performance evaluation approaches. In addition, the framework is applied in comparing existing performance evaluation approaches. The framework can be used to select methods for evaluating architectures, to increase understanding of the methods, and to point out needs for future work.