Independent Model-Driven Software Performance Assessments of UML Designs

In many software development projects, performance requirements are not addressed until after the application is developed or deployed, resulting in costly changes to the software or the acquisition of expensive high-performance hardware. To remedy this, researchers have developed model-driven performance analysis techniques for assessing how well performance requirements are being satisfied early in the software lifecycle. In some cases, companies may not have the expertise to perform such analysis on their software; therefore they have an independent assessor perform the analysis. This paper describes an approach for conducting independent model-driven software performance assessments of UML 2.0 designs and illustrates this approach using a real-time signal generator as a case study