Automated and Adaptable Decision Support for Software Performance Engineering

Software performance engineering (SPE) provides a plethora of methods and tooling for measuring, modeling, and evaluating performance properties of software systems. The solution approaches come with different strengths and limitations concerning, for example, accuracy, time-to-result, or system overhead. While approaches allow for interchangeability, the choice of an appropriate approach and tooling to solve a given performance concern still relies on expert knowledge. Currently, there is no automated and extensible approach for decision support. In this paper, we present a methodology for the automated selection of performance engineering approaches tailored to user concerns. We decouple the complexity of selecting an SPE approach for a given scenario providing a decision engine and solution approach capability models. This separation allows to easily append additional solution approaches and rating criteria. We demonstrate the applicability by presenting decision engines that compare measurement- and model-based analysis approaches.