An analytical model for performance evaluation of software architectural styles

Software architecture is an abstract model that gives syntactic and semantic information about the components of a software system and the relationship among them. The success of the software depends on whether the system can satisfy the quality attributes. One of the most critical aspects of the quality attributes of a software system is its performance. Performance analysis can be useful for assessing whether a proposed architecture can meet the desired performance specifications and whether it can help in making key architectural decisions. An architecture style is a set of principles which an architect uses in designing software architecture. Since software architectural styles have frequently been used by architects, these styles have a specific effect on quality attributes. If this effect is measurable for each existing style, it will enable the architect to evaluate and make architectural decisions more easily and precisely. In this paper an effort has been made to introduce a model for investigating this attributes in architectural styles. So, our approach initially models the system as Discrete Time Markov Chain or DTMC, and then extracts the parameters to predict the response time of the system.