Certification of Software Component Performance Specifications

In software engineering, performance specifications of components support the successful evolution of complex software systems. Having trustworthy specifications is important to reliably detect unwanted effects of modifications on the performance using prediction techniques before they are experienced in live systems. This is especially important if there is no test system available and a system can’t be taken down or replaced in its entirety. Existing approaches neglect stating the quality of specifications at all and hence the quality of the prediction is lowered if the assumption that all used specifications are suitable does not hold. In this paper, we propose a test-based approach to validate performance specifications against deployed component implementations. The validation is used to certify specifications which in turn allow assessing the suitability of specifications for predicting the performance of a software system. A small example shows that the certification approach is applicable and creates trustworthy performance specifications.