Architectural QoS Predictions in Model-Driven Development of Component-Based Software

Continuous quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning is becoming increasingly important in the software development lifecycle of distributed systems. For component-based software, it also requires understanding of extra-functional properties of each individual component. However, black-box components, as most commonly provided by current component models, do not provide sufficient details to predict QoS. This paper describes which information about a component is needed to enable relevant analyses and emphasizes that prediction feedback should not based on internal models, but based on models which the domain experts understand. Hence, a mechanism is required to annotate analysis results and back into the original models provided by the domain experts. This paper proposes a new approach to provide QoS predictions of distributed systems throughout the whole development lifecycle.