Performance validation of mobile software architectures

Abstract

Design paradigms based on the idea of code mobility have been recently introduced, where components of an application may (autonomously or upon request) move to different locations, during the application execution. Besides, software technologies are readily available (e.g. Javabased), that provide tools to implement these paradigms. Based on mobile code paradigms and technologies, different but functionally equivalent software architectures can be defined and it is widely recognized that, in general, the adoption of a particular architecture can have a large impact on quality attributes such as modifiability, reusability, reliability, and performance. Hence, validation against specific attributes is necessary and claims for a careful planning of this activity. Within this framework, the goal of this tutorial is twofold: to provide a general methodology for the validation of software architectures, where the focus is on the transition from the modeling of software architectures to the validation of non-functional requirements; to substantiate this general methodology into the specific case of software architectures exploiting mobile code.