A New Algorithm for Performance Evaluation of Homogeneous Architectural Styles

Software architecture is considered one of the most important indices of software engineering today. Software Architecture is a technical description of a system indicating its component structures and their relationships, and is the principles and rules governing designing. The success of the software depends on whether the system can satisfy the quality attributes. One of the most critical aspects of the quality attributes of a software system is its performance. Performance analysis can be useful for assessing whether a proposed architecture can meet the desired performance specifications and whether it can help in making key architectural decisions. Architecture style is a set of principles which an architect uses in designing software architecture. Since software architectural styles have frequently been used by architects, these styles have a specific effect on quality attributes. If this effect is measurable for each existing style, it will enable the architect to evaluate and make architectural decisions more easily and precisely. In this paper an effort has been made to introduce a new algorithm for investigating performance in homogeneous architectural styles based on Markov chains. Moreover, How to use this Markov chains model for performance evaluation is shown and simulation and the implications of this transformation are described completely. Finally, to represent the usage of our proposed algorithm, a case study is presented as an example.