UML Design and Software Performance Modeling

The importance of integrating performance evaluation into the software development process from the very early stages has been widely recognized during last years. The goal is to individuate performance behavior before the system is actually implemented reducing costs and time, and permitting to compare different design choices. The main drawback of this approach is the time and the background knowledge required to transform the specifications of a software system into a performance model. In this paper, we present a model for setting performance requirements collected from a UML [9] project. This represents the first step towards an automatic process for computing performance measures starting from an UML specified model. The approach proposed is based on open and well-known standards: UML for the software modeling, the Profile for Schedulability, Performance, and Time Specification for the performance annotations and XMI for the interchange of metadata.