Early performance assessment in component‐based software systems

Most techniques used to assess the qualitative characteristics of software are done in testing phase of software development. Assessment of performance in the early software development process is particularly important to risk management. Software architecture, as the first product, plays an important role in the development of the complex software systems. Using software architecture, quality attributes (such as performance, reliability and security) can be evaluated at the early stages of the software development. In this study, the authors present a framework for taking the advantages of architectural description to evaluate software performance. To do so, the authors describe static structure and architectural behaviour of a software system as the sequence diagram and the component diagram of the Unified Modelling Language (UML), respectively; then, the described model is automatically converted into the ‘interface automata’, which provides the formal foundation for the evaluation. Finally, the evaluation of architectural performance is performed using ‘queuing theory’. The proposed framework can help the software architect to choose an appropriate architecture in terms of quality or remind him/her of making necessary changes in the selected architecture. The main difference among the proposed method and other methods is that the proposed method benefits the informal description methods, such as UML, to describe the architecture of software systems; it also enjoys a formal and lightweight language, called ‘interface automata’ to provide the infrastructure for verification and evaluation.