Patterns of Performance

The performance of a system has very distinct, visible and measurable significance. The quality attributes embodied in performance are primarily response time and throughput and speak directly to the reliability of the system to deliver the promised benefit to the sponsor. As industry demands of software investments increase in terms of lower cost, higher quality and tighter schedules for delivery-new concepts, processes, techniques and ultimately tools must be developed to meet this need. Thus, the motivations for this paper to propose a new concept and process that would help the Software Architect design performance into the system from its very conception. We blend existing Software Performance Engineering practices with Design Patterns in UML to develop the concept of a Structural Property. This Structural Property is then measured and tested at the pattern level to find correlations and standard relationships. We postulate that by using these concepts and its related process of analysis, performance behavior can be predicted not only within one pattern, but predicted across multiple patterns, as the Software Architect rationalizes design decisions amongst both patterns and their associated quality attributes.