Early performance testing of distributed software applications

Performance characteristics, such as response time, throughput and scalability, are key quality attributes of distributed applications. Current practice, however, rarely applies systematic techniques to evaluate performance characteristics. We argue that evaluation of performance is particularly crucial in early development stages, when important architectural choices are made. At first glance, this contradicts the use of testing techniques, which are usually applied towards the end of a project. In this paper, we assume that many distributed systems are built with middleware technologies, such as the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) or the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). These provide services and facilities whose implementations are available when architectures are defined. We also note that it is the middleware functionality, such as transaction and persistence services, remote communication primitives and threading policy primitives, that dominate distributed ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: WOSP
• Authors: Giovanni Denaro, Andrea Polini, Wolfgang Emmerich
• Keywords: Distributed Application, Performance, Performance Characteristics, Software Engineering, WOSP 2004