A Simulation-Based Approach to Software Performance Modeling

Quantitative performance analysis of software systems should be integrated in the early stages of the development process. We propose a simulation-based performance modeling of software architectures specified in UML. We propose an algorithm for deriving a simulation model from annotated UML software architectures. We introduce the annotation for some UML diagrams, i.e., Use Case, Activity and Deployment diagrams, to describe system performance parameters. Then we show how to derive a process-oriented simulation model by automatically extracting information from the UML diagrams. Simulation provides performance results that are reported into the UML diagrams as tagged values. The proposed methodology has been implemented into a prototype tool called UML-ψ (UML Performance SImulator), The proposed methodology will be illustrated on a simple case study.