Built-In Performance and Robustness Engineering Capabilities by a Formalised and Automated Software Development Process

Performance engineering aims to demonstrate that the software being developed will meet the performance needs. The goal of robustness engineering is to prove that the system can function correctly in the presence of faults or stress conditions. From this point of view robustness engineering comprises performance engineering as a specific case of normal operational conditions. This shall allow to share the means for monitoring of a system's properties between performance and robustness engineering. Usually, performance analysis is done prior to or in parallel with the development of the operational software by modelling it representatively regarding performance. This paper describes an approach, called ISG (Instantaneous System and Software Generation), which allows to measure the performance and the robustness right from the beginning of the development until the very end when executing the operational software itself. ISG automates the development process, so that the required instrumentation can easily be inserted or removed, a capability which is a pre-condition to obtain performance and robustness figures from the operational software. Consequently, no additional models need to be established to analyse the non-functional properties of the software under development.