SPL: Unit Testing Performance

Unit testing is an attractive quality management tool in the software development process, however, practical obstacles make it difficult to use unit tests for performance testing. We present Stochastic Performance Logic, a formalism for expressing performance requirements, together with interpretations that facilitate performance evaluation in the unit test context. The formalism and the interpretations are evaluated in multiple experiments, to demonstrate (1) the ability to reflect typical developer concerns related to performance, and (2) the ability to identify performance differences in realistic measurements. This work was partially supported by the EU project ASCENS 257414 and Charles University institutional funding D3S, Technical Report no. D3S-TR-2014-04