Managing Software Performance Engineering Activities with the Performance Refinement and Evolution Model (PREM)

Performance is one of the important non-functional requirements for a software system. A system that runs too slowly is likely to be rejected by all users. Failure to achieve some expected performance level might make the system unusable, and the project might fail or get cancelled if the system performance objective is not met [38]. To build performance into a software system, the development team needs to take performance into consideration through the whole development cycle [13]. Many models, techniques, and methodologies are proposed, trying to address the software performance problems. However, those solutions require different levels of understanding of the performance characteristics. For example, using an unnecessarily complicated performance model during the early stages may require the development team to make assumptions for unknown performance factors. The model may be inaccurate or even useless. The development team needs to choose a proper performance technique, based on the understanding of the performance characteristics, for the technique to provide useful feedback.