Palladio-based performance blame analysis

Performance is an important quality attribute for business infor-mation systems. When a tester has spotted a performance error, the error is passed to the software developers to fix it. However, in component-based software development the tester has to do blame analysis first, i. e. the tester has to decide, which party is responsi-ble to fix the error. If the error is a design or deployment issue, it can be assigned to the software architect or the system deployer. If the error is specific to a component, it needs to be assigned to the corresponding component developer. An accurate blame analysis is important, because wrong assignments of errors will cause a loss of time and money. Our approach aims at doing blame analysis for performance errors by comparing performance metrics obtained in performance test-ing and performance prediction. We use performance prediction values as expected values for individual components. For perfor-mance prediction we use the Palladio approach. By this means, our approach evaluates each component’s performance in a cer-tain test case. If the component performs poorly, its component developer needs to fix the component or the architect replaces the component with a faster one. If no component performs poorly, we can deduce that there is a design or deployment issue and the architecture needs to be changed. In this paper, we present an exemplary blame analysis based on a web shop system. The ex-ample shows the feasibility of our approach