Family-based performance analysis of variant-rich software systems

Abstract

We study models of software systems with variants that stem from a specific choice of configuration parameters with a direct impact on performance properties. Using UML activity diagrams with quantitative annotations, we model such systems as a product line. The efficiency of a product-based evaluation is typically low because each product must be analyzed in isolation, making difficult the re-use of computations across variants. Here, we propose a family-based approach based on symbolic computation. A numerical assessment on large activity diagrams shows that this approach can be up to three orders of magnitude faster than product-based analysis in large models, thus enabling computationally efficient explorations of large parameter spaces. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.