User-friendly approach for handling performance parameters during predictive software performance engineering

A Software Product Line (SPL) is a set of similar software systems that share a common set of features. Instead of building each product from scratch, SPL development takes advantage of the reusability of the core assets shared among the SPL members. In this work, we integrate performance analysis in the early phases of SPL development process, applying the same reusability concept to the performance annotations. Instead of annotating from scratch the UML model of every derived product, we propose to annotate the SPL model once with generic performance annotations. After deriving the model of a product from the family model by an automatic transformation, the generic performance annotations need to be bound to concrete product-specific values provided by the developer. Dealing manually with a large number of performance annotations, by asking the developer to inspect every diagram in the generated model and to extract these annotations is an error-prone process. In this paper we propose to automate the collection of all generic parameters from the product model and to present them to the developer in a user-friendly format (e.g., a spreadsheet per diagram, indicating each generic parameter together with guiding information that helps the user in providing concrete binding values). There are two kinds of generic parametric annotations handled by our approach: product-specific (corresponding to the set of features selected for the product) and platform-specific (such as device choices, network connections, middleware, and runtime environment). The following model transformations for (a) generating a product model with generic annotations from the SPL model, (b) building the spreadsheet with generic parameters and guiding information, and (c) performing the actual binding are all realized in the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL). Copyright 2012 ACM