An Empirical Investigation of the Applicability of a Component-Based Performance Prediction Method

Component-based software performance engineering (CBSPE) methods shall enable software architects to assess the expected response times, throughputs, and resource utilization of their systems already during design. This avoids the violation of performance requirements. Existing approaches for CBSPE either lack tool support or rely on prototypical tools, who have only been applied by their authors. Therefore, industrial applicability of these methods is unknown. On this behalf, we have conducted a controlled experiment involving 19 computer science students, who analysed the performance of two component-based designs using our Palladio performance prediction approach, as an example for a CBSPE method. Our study is the first of its type in this area and shall help to mature CBSPE to industrial applicability. In this paper, we report on results concerning the prediction accuracy achieved by the students and list several lessons learned, which are also relevant for other methods than Palladio.