The DIN/ISO Definition and a Measurement Procedure of SW-Efficiency

and foreword: People like to assign the attribute speed (i. e. performance) not only to hardware but also to software. But software does not have an attribute speed. Software defines for each user initiated task a sequence of information processing steps (machine instructions) to be performed. A suitable term for the aspect under construction can only be found when having a second imlementation (Imp2) of the application on the same hardware. We have to perform two performance measurements of the data processing system. Measurement 1, using the first implementation (Imp1), yields the performance value P1. Measurement 2, using the second implementation (Imp1), yields the performance value P2. To find a term describing the property of the software we compare P1 to P2. This yields a measure of „how good“ Imp2 transforms the task submitted into a sequence of machine instructions compared to Imp1: Imp2 is less or more efficient than Imp1.