A Quality Monitoring Framework

Information about quality related characteristics such as reliability, performance, us-ability, maintainability and robustness are generally collected in an ad hoc manner in the development and maintenance of large software systems. This paper details the construction of a framework for continuously monitoring these characteristics while a system is operating. The framework is based around an instrumenting Erlang (to C) compiler. By allowing quality assurance personnel to build the monitoring processes as part of system development, the framework provided by this compiler enables the monitoring of quality characteristics as deened in the system speciications. The monitoring processes are automatically linked and spawned in conjunction with the functional processes they are intended to monitor. With the support of multi-processor hardware this type of monitoring can be done without`typical' programmers needing to know about the monitoring and without signiicantly inhibiting thèstraight-line' user perceived functional execution speed of the system.