Testing of multi-user applications under realistic and stress loads remains the only way to ensure appropriate performance and reliability in production. The author outlines some issues to consider for performance testing of distributed business applications and presents the typical pitfalls from the practical point of view. While the original objective was to contrast load testing with functio...

Unit testing is an attractive quality management tool in the software development process, however, practical obstacles make it difficult to use unit tests for performance testing. We present Stochastic Performance Logic, a formalism for expressing performance requirements, together with interpretations that facilitate performance evaluation in the unit test context. The formalism and the inter...

Complementary to performance evaluation, the performance testing of communicating protocols is a qualitative and quantitative test of a system, aiming at verifying whether the performance requirements of the protocol have been satisfied under certain conditions. Conformance testing of communicating protocols is a functional test which verifies whether the behaviours of the protocol satisfy defi...

Predicting the performance of software architectures during early design stages is an active field of research in software engineering. It is expected that accurate predictions minimize the risk of performance problems in software systems by a great extent. This would improve quality and save development time and costs of subsequent code fixings. Although a lot of different methods have been pr...

This paper presents a kind of application of the software performance engineering to the area of agent-based systems. In a first part we will describe the general aspects and contents of multi agent systems (MAS) architectures. Then, a short presentation of the main software performance principles should motivate the measurement approaches for the MAS. Software agents can be intelligent as well...