Towards Platform-Independent Component Measurement

Deriving resource properties of software components is a prerequisite for the specification of non-functional properties allowing a developer to also consider these properties for the application to build. In this paper, we describe a platform-independent approach to measure Java components in terms of a selected set of basic constituents (so called atoms), which partition a program and are used to describe concrete runs of components. We combine those abstract measurements with data describing a concrete platform (so called system vector), which results in the estimation of the components’ run-time on that previously unknown platform. Furthermore, we elaborate on how to choose a set of atoms and how to determine a system vector for an unknown platform. Our implementation uses bytecode instrumentation for the measurement of components and is able to support different sets of atoms.