Performance prediction based on semi-formal software architectural description

Mature engineering includes systematic quantified architectural design. Software engineering lacks engineering methodologies in architectural design and the evaluation of the design in terms of performance. This paper presents a methodology and its accompanying toolset, Workflow-to-SDL Direct Simulation (W2S), for generating a simulator from a semi-formal architecture description. We have used this simulator to study the behavior and reliability of the system. This paper focuses on the performance aspect of the system. We used the simulator to predict the system's performance before the system is built to guild us in the selection of architecture designs. The focus of our research is the telecommunication domain. The W2S methodology was applied to a network resource management system, using a set of tools that we developed. Several sets of experiments were carried out. The result shows that the information generated by the simulator can be used to predict the performance of a system solely based on its architectural description. It allows designers to select architectures with better performance.