A FRAMEWORK FOR PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING DURING INFORMATION-SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

Software performance engineering aims at predicting and improving the performance of applications during development and in production. This paper presents a framework for performance engineering of information systems with emphasis on parameter estimation support. The need for performance engineering of information systems is discussed. Views of information system and performance modelling are presented. It is shown how application specifcations can be extended with performance annotations. The resulting framework is applied to predict and improve the performance of projected applications during development. Sensitivity analysis is supported to point out performance bottlenecks in the application and suggest which parameters to estimate with most care. Target platform modelling is provided to relieve the information system developer from assessing the performance of the target platform and operating system software. The framework is realised in terms of the PrM language for software specification. Finally, some conclusions are offered.