dqualizer: Domain-Centric Runtime Quality Analysis of Business-Critical Application Systems

Abstract

The runtime quality of application systems-e.g., performance, reliability, and resilience-directly influences companies' business success. Over the last few years, corresponding analysis measures such as load tests or monitoring have become widespread in practice, and mature commercial and open-source tools have been developed. However, these measures are all at the technical level and not interpreted at the (business) domain level. At the same time, software architecture and software development approaches such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), which are becoming increasingly widespread, essentially do not consider runtime quality concerns despite their criticality. Our envisioned dqualizer approach aims to close the gap between the domain-specificity of application systems and the (technical) measures and findings of quality assurance utilizing a domain-centric approach. For this purpose, we integrate means to model and monitor runtime quality metrics into DDD-based techniques, e.g., Domain Story Telling, that enable domain experts to describe domain-centric runtime quality concerns. Our preliminary results comprise the prototypical extension of a domain story editor for specifying load and resilience tests and reporting test results. Using the editor, we gathered feedback from domain experts in a qualitative user study. Despite the editor's limitations regarding functionality and usability, the feedback indicated that domain experts are able to model runtime quality analyses.