Performance Engineering Of Software Systems

“If this book had been available to Healthcare.gov’s contractors, and they read and followed its life cycle performance processes, there would not have been the enormous problems apparent in that application. In my 40+ years of experience in building leading-edge products, poor performance is the single most frequent cause of the failure or cancellation of software-intensive projects. This book provides techniques and skills necessary to implement performance engineering at the beginning of a project and manage it throughout the product’s life cycle. I cannot recommend it highly enough.” –Don Shafer, CSDP, Technical Fellow, Athens Group, LLC Poor performance is a frequent cause of software project failure. Performance engineering can be extremely challenging. In Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering, leading software performance expert Dr. André Bondi helps you create effective performance requirements up front, and then architect, develop, test, and deliver systems that meet them. Drawing on many years of experience at Siemens, AT&T Labs, Bell Laboratories, and two startups, Bondi offers practical guidance for every software stakeholder and development team participant. He shows you how to define and use metrics; plan for diverse workloads; evaluate scalability, capacity, and responsiveness; and test both individual components and entire systems. Throughout, Bondi helps you link performance engineering with everything else you do in the software life cycle, so you can achieve the right performance–now and in the future–at lower cost and with less pain. This guide will help you • Mitigate the business and engineering risk associated with poor system performance • Specify system performance requirements in business and engineering terms • Identify metrics for comparing performance requirements with actual performance • Verify the accuracy of measurements • Use simple mathematical models to make predictions, plan performance tests, and anticipate the impact of changes to the system or the load placed upon it • Avoid common performance and scalability mistakes • Clarify business and engineering needs to be satisfied by given levels of throughput and response time • Incorporate performance engineering into agile processes • Help stakeholders of a system make better performance-related decisions • Manage stakeholders’ expectations about system performance throughout the software life cycle, and deliver a software product with quality performance André B. Bondi is a senior staff engineer at Siemens Corp., Corporate Technologies in Princeton, New Jersey. His specialties include performance requirements, performance analysis, modeling, simulation, and testing. Bondi has applied his industrial and academic experience to the solution of performance issues in many problem domains. In addition to holding a doctorate in computer science and a master’s in statistics, he is a Certified Scrum Master.

Initially, computer systems performance analyses were carried out primarily because of limited resources. Due to ever increasing functional complexity of computational systems and user requirements, performance engineering continues to play a major role in software development. This book assesses the state of the art in performance engineering. Besides revised chapters drawn from two workshops on performance engineering held in 2000, additional chapters were solicited in order to provide complete coverage of all relevant aspects. The first part is devoted to the relation between software engineering and performance engineering; the second part focuses on the use of models, measures, and tools; finally, case studies with regard to concrete technologies are presented. Researchers, professional software engineers, and advanced students interested in performance analysis will find this book an indispensable source of information and reference.

Poor performance is one of the main quality-related shortcomings that cause software projects to fail. Thus, the need to address performance concerns early during the software development process is fully acknowledged, and there is a growing interest in the research and software industry communities towards techniques, methods and tools that permit to manage system performance concerns as an integral part of software engineering. Model-based software performance analysis introduces performance concerns in the scope of software modeling, thus allowing the developer to carry on performance analysis throughout the software lifecycle. With this book, Cortellessa, Di Marco and Inverardi provide the cross-knowledge that allows developers to tackle software performance issues from the very early phases of software development. They explain the basic concepts of performance analysis and describe the most representative methodologies used to annotate and transform software models into performance models. To this end, they go all the way from performance primers through software and performance modeling notations to the latest transformation-based methodologies. As a result, their book is a self-contained reference text on software performance engineering, from which different target groups will benefit: professional software engineers and graduate students in software engineering will learn both basic concepts of performance modeling and new methodologies; while performance specialists will find out how to investigate software performance model building.

Embedded systems often have one or more real-time requirements. The complexity of modern embedded software systems requires a systematic approach for achieving these performance targets. An ad hoc process can lead to missed deadlines, poorly performing systems and cancelled projects. There is a maturity required to define, manage, and deliver on multiple real-time performance requirements. Software performance engineering (SPE) is a discipline within the broader systems engineering area that can improve the maturity of the performance engineering process. SPE is a systematic, quantitative approach to constructing software systems that meet performance objectives. SPE is a software-oriented approach; it focuses on architecture, design, and implementation choices. It focuses on the activities, techniques, and deliverables that are applied at every phase of the embedded software development life-cycle, especially responsiveness and scalability, to ensure software is being architected and implemented to meet the performance-related requirements of the system.

Software development is replete with risks. Will the finished software run quickly enough? Will the underlying hardware and network infrastructure be sufficient? Will the system scale? You can now get the answers you need, up-front, in time to act. This book introduces Software Performance Engineering (SPE), a proven step-by-step methodology for predicting the development challenges and performance of any object-oriented system -- and for managing development to achieve performance objectives. Performance experts Connie Smith and Lloyd Williams show how to build quantitative models of software before it is built, analyzing performance based on proposed architecture and design. Learn how to elicit performance objectives, gather relevant data, and evaluate performance throughout development and the rest of the software lifecycle. For software engineers, developers, architects, analysts, performance specialists, project managers, and other IT professionals who want to deliver higher-performance object-oriented software systems.

These proceedings include tutorials and papers presented at the Sixth CSR Confer ence on the topic of Large Software Systems. The aim of the Conference was to identify solutions to the problems of developing and maintaining large software systems, based on approaches which are currently being undertaken by software practitioners. These proceedings are intended to make these solutions more widely available to the software industry. The papers from software practitioners describe: • important working systems, highlighting their problems and successes; • techniques for large system development and maintenance, including project management, quality management, incremental delivery, system security, in dependent V & V, and reverse engineering. In addition, academic and industrial researchers discuss the practical impact of current research in formal methods, object-oriented design and advanced environ ments. The keynote paper is provided by Professor Brian Warboys of ICL and the University of Manchester, who masterminded the development of the ICL VME Operating System, and the production of the first database-driven software en gineering environment (CADES). The proceedings commence with reports of the two tutorial sessions which preceded the conference: • Professor Keith Bennett of the Centre for Software Maintenance at Durham University on Software Maintenance; • Professor John McDermid of the University of York on Systems Engineering Environments for High Integrity Systems. The remaining papers deal with reports on existing systems (starting with Professor Warboys' keynote paper), approaches to large systems development, methods for large systems maintenance and the expected impact of current research.