The program is available on a separate page.

The first ACM Workshop on Challenges in Performance Methods for Software Development was held in Austin, Texas, on Jan. 31 2015, and was co-located with the 2015 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE). Its purpose was to open up new avenues of research on methods for software developers to address performance problems. The software world is changing, and there are new challenges. As its name implies, the workshop includes the description of problems as well as solutions. The acronym WOSP-C also recalls the original discussion-heavy format of WOSP, the ACM International Workshop on Software and Performance, which has been a co-organizer of ICPE since 2010.

Challenges

The workshop papers and discussions were asked to explore the new challenges to product performance that have arisen due to changes in software and in the development process, such as:

• faster development means less time for performance-related planning and analysis,
• the need for scalability and adaptability increases the pressure while introducing new sources of delay,
• model-driven engineering, component engineering and software development tools offer opportunities but their exploitation requires effort and carries risks,
• use of third-party services and components reduces the developer’s control over the end-to-end performance
• mobile applications require fast response in a difficult environment

These software-related challenges have led to important performance failures, such as the roll-out of the healthcare.gov web site in the US. It is probably fair to say that

1. performance is a major problem in system development today,
2. no one is satisfied with the methods available to address it,
3. there is no agreement on how to improve the situation.

This workshop was intended to describe the challenges and to explore ways in which software performance engineering methods can be developed to provide solutions.

New challenges imply new opportunities for progress, and there are new tools that we may be able to incorporate (for example, methods for big-data analysis). So suggestions for new lines of attack are as important for the workshop, as the characterization of the challenges.

The workshop program lists the presented papers while the discussions during the workshop are summarized below.

Software Performance Engineering Methods

Three books that provide the background on methods for dealing with performance of software are those of Smith and Williams [1] (including making performance models from UML design models), Cortellessa et al [2] (using various kinds of models to analyze performance) and Bondi [3] (a book on useful processes, not model-based, and going beyond software).

Software performance engineering methods as understood for this workshop seek to structure and unify the understanding of performance effects and their causes, and to support extrapolation of existing knowledge to provide predictions of performance for new developments and configurations of a system. This generally requires some kind of model.

Discussion Topics

References

[1] Connie U. Smith, Lloyd Williams, “Performance Solutions: A Practical Guide to Creating Responsive, Scalable Software”, Addison-Wesley, 2002.

[2] Vittorio Cortellessa, Antinisca di Marco, Paola Inverardi, “Model-Based Software Performance Analysis”, Springer, 2011.

[3] Andre Bondi, “Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering”, Addison-Wesley, 2014.

[4] DevOps description at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps

[5] Fabian Brosig, Philipp Meier, Steffen Becker, Anne Koziolek, Heiko Koziolek, and Samuel Kounev. “Quantitative evaluation of model-driven performance analysis and simulation of component-based architectures”, IEEE Trans on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions, Oct 2014.

[6] Murray Woodside, Dorina C. Petriu, Jose Merseguer, Dorin B. Petriu, Mohammad Alhaj, Transformation challenges: from software models to performance models, Software and Systems Modeling, v. 13 n 4 pp 1529-1552 Oct 2014.

[7] Murray Woodside, Greg Franks, Dorina C. Petriu, "The Future of Software Performance Engineering", Proc Future of Software Engineering 2007, eds L. Briand, and A. Wolf, IEEE Computer Society Order Number P2829, May 2007, pp 171-187.

[8] Yasir Shoaib and Olivia Das, “Performance-oriented Cloud Provisioning: Taxonomy and Survey”, Nov 2014, submitted for publication, available on arxiv.org/abs/1411.5077

[9] Matthias Becker, Markus Luckey, Steffen Becker, “Model-Driven Performance Engineering of Self-Adaptive Systems: A Survey”, Proc. QoSA’12, June 25–28, 2012, Bertinoro, Italy.