Abstract

In the development of a large, complex, distributed and Internet based software application, the performance is an important quality to be considered by the developers. A methodology called Multilevel Specification and Performance Analysis (MSPA) is proposed for tracking the performance of a specification during its development through successive levels of abstraction. The MSPA captures the specification of a system using Use Case Maps (UCM) and constructs a performance model as a Layered Queuing Network (LQN), which is then solved to obtain the performance analysis results. The use of tools and automation makes the performance analysis easier to accomplish.

The MSPA methodology is evaluated on the specification of a presence system on the Internet with interesting performance results. The scalability and the sensitivity of the system are studied and the bottleneck of the system is identified. The important performance results for the simpler, more abstract models are still valid for the more complex and more detailed models.

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