Locating Performance Improvement Opportunities in an Industrial Software-as-a-Service Application

Locating Performance Improvement Opportunities in an Industrial Software-as-a-Service Application

Bezemer, C.P.
Zaidman, A.E.
Van der Hoeven, A.
Van de Graaf, A.
Wiertz, M.
Weijers, R.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Computer Technology

2012-12-31

Preprint of paper published in: ICSM 2012 - Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 23-28 September 2012; doi:10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405319 The goal of performance maintenance is to improve the performance of a software system after delivery. As the performance of a system is often characterized by unexpected combinations of metric values, manual analysis of performance is hard in complex systems. In this paper, we extend our previous work on performance anomaly detection with a technique that helps performance experts locate spots — so-called performance improvement opportunities (PIOs) —, for possible performance improvements. PIOs give performance experts a starting point for performance improvements, e.g., by pinpointing the bottleneck component. The technique uses a combination of association rules and several visualizations, such as heat maps, which were implemented in an open source tool called WEDJAT. In this paper, we evaluate our technique and WEDJAT in a field user study with three performance experts from industry using data from a large-scale industrial application. From our field study we conclude that our technique is useful for speeding up the performance maintenance process and that heat maps are a valuable way of visualizing performance data.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9253b7b1-ed72-453e-b400-9dd63036dee6

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2012-013

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2012 The Author(s)
IEEE