Decision Support via Automated Metric Comparison for the Palladio-based Performance Blame Analysis

When developing component-based systems, we incorporate third-party black-box components. For each component, perfor-mance contracts have been specified by their developers. If errors occur when testing the system built from these components, it is very important to find out whether components violate their per-formance contracts or whether the composition itself is faulty. This task is called performance blame analysis. In our previous work we presented a performance blame analysis approach that blames components based on a comparison of response time values from the failed test case to expected values derived from the performance contract. In that approach, the system architect needs to manually assess if the test data series shows faster or slower response times than the data derived from the contract. This is laborious as the system architect has to do this for each component operation. In this paper we present an automated comparison of each pair of data series as decision support. In contrast to our work, other approaches do not achieve fully auto-mated decision support, because they do not incorporate sophisti-cated contracts. We exemplify our performance blame analysis including the automated decision support using the “Commo