Giovanni Denaro
Dip. di Informatica, Sistemistica e Communicazione
Universita di Milano Bicocca
I-20126 Milano, Italy
Andrea Polini
ISTI-CNR
Via Moruzzi 1
I-56124 Pisa, Italy
Wolfgang Emmerich
Dept. of Computer Science
University College London
Dept. of Computer Science
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT UK
Abstract:
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 system performance. Drawing on these observations, this
paper presents a novel approach to performance testing of
distributed applications. We propose to derive application-specific
test cases from architecture designs so that performance of a
distributed application can be tested using the middleware software
at early stages of a development process. We report empirical
results that support the viability of the approach.
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Updated on: 14/10/2003
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