Performance Engineering

In the area of software systems with their more or less restrictive performance requirements Software Performance Engineering (SPE) has gained a particular importance for the early development phases. Since the concrete performance behaviour can be determined at the implemented product only, furthermore usually in certain use cases only, there is a mixture of design activities (projection of the software model to the real hardware and software platforms) with specification and related requirements analysis activities. Since knowledge of the performance behaviour of the real system is already required in early phases, several information sources have to be used. These sources can be the development of prototypes, the modelling based on special abstractions, the use of manufacturer information, the use of experiments or trend analyses for the system application. This paper analyses existing models and methods for the performance-oriented system development based on a general framework, developed at Magdeburg University. The framework enables the derivation of possible assessable relations between software development components, thus guarantees respectively models an aspect-related system alignment. As a source of information for the development process the WWW will be presented, as (external) Internet or as (internal) Intranet. The information resources used in this context with its passive and interactive characteristics lead to a software development infrastructure, shown here as a exemplary concept for the performance engineering.