PRIMA-UML: a performance validation incremental methodology on early UML diagrams

The development of complex software systems satisfying performance requirements is achievable only spending careful attention to performance goals throughout the lifecycle, and especially from its very beginning. Unified modeling language (UML) is quickly becoming a standard notation for specification and design of software systems. UML offers several diagrams for separating concerns of different system views, and this feature is helpful to derive early performance models that take into account combined data from these diagrams. In this paper, we introduce a methodology Performance Incremental Validation in UML (PRIMA-UML) aimed at generating a queueing network based performance model from UML diagrams that are usually available early in the software lifecycle. PRIMA-UML is incremental in that it combines information extracted from (and annotated into) different UML diagrams to piecewise build the performance model. Besides, this is not a “black box” approach, as the methodology is open to embed information coming from other UML diagrams (possibly in late lifecycle phases) for detailing, refining or domain tailoring the performance model. This work is a contribute to encompass the performance validation task as an integrated activity within the development process of complex systems. We apply the methodology to a quite simple example to show how effective it can be to get early performance insights.