Tool Support for Software Performance Risk Assessment

Tool Support for Software Performance Risk Assessment Archana Radhakrishnan The Software Architecture Risk Assessment (SARA) tool is a utility to compute and analyze different architectural risk factors of software architecture modeled using Unified Modeling Language (UML). The different architectural risk factors are maintainability, requirements, reliability, and performance. The problem report focuses on risk assessment of software performance. Performance risk is a non-functional attribute which is generally assessed during late life cycle of software architecture design and has high impact on safety-critical systems in case of performance failure. The risk is a combination of probability of performance failure and severity and they are estimated using a Software Performance Risk Assessment (SPRA) methodology. A tool is developed supporting this methodology and added as one of the risk assessment features of SARA tool. It performs scenario based performance risk assessment of a model by analyzing annotated UML diagrams. The output is expressed as scenario risk factor and overall system risk factor. It provides a descriptive explanation of the results obtained in each step of the methodology. The results help in identifying the risk factor and the bottleneck component causing high risk of scenarios in the software model. The tool is illustrated with various case studies.