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Automating performance-related impact analysis through event based traceability

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Abstract

Current impact analysis techniques tend to focus on assessing the impact of change upon the system's functionality, whilst a consideration of performance related requirements is often deferred until after implementation. This tendency can lead to costly and time-consuming mistakes that frustrate customers and require frantic last-minute efforts to fix. This paper proposes a method for supporting performance-related impact analysis in a heterogeneous software engineering environment. An event-based approach is taken to establish dynamic traceability links, capable of propagating data values and commands between requirements and performance models. Quantitative values in performance related requirements are adjusted to reflect proposed changes, and impacted models are re-executed to measure the impact of the change. The resulting outputs are then automatically compared to relevant performance requirements and a system-wide report showing the impact of the proposed change upon performance is generated.

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Notes

  1. References to all of the requirements management tools discussed in this paper can be obtained from the Atlantic Systems Guild website at http://www.systemsguild.com/GuildSite/Robs/retools.html.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially funded by NSF grant CCR-0098346. We also wish to acknowledge the students who helped develop the EBT prototype—Kumar Javvaji, Fuhu Liu, Tim Peng Liu and Gaurav Sethi from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Haroon Chaudhry and Amit Uchat from DePaul University. We would also like to give special thanks to Steve Chen for his invaluable comments and contributions. We also thank our industrial collaborators, especially Telelogic for providing DOORS requirements management software through their University Partnership program, and the vendors listed on our SABRE consortium Website, who have worked with us to provide EBT interfaces from their products.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, DePaul University, 243 So. Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60604-2287, USA

    Jane Cleland-Huang

  2. Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, 226 Atanasoff Hall, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA

    Carl K. Chang

  3. CommWorks Corporation, 3800 Golf Road, Rolling Meadows, IL 60008, USA

    Jeffrey C. Wise

Authors
  1. Jane Cleland-Huang
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  2. Carl K. Chang
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  3. Jeffrey C. Wise
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Correspondence to Jane Cleland-Huang.

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Cleland-Huang, J., K. Chang, C. & C. Wise, J. Automating performance-related impact analysis through event based traceability. Requirements Eng 8, 171–182 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-003-0175-z

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