Concern-driven Reporting of Software Performance Analysis Results

Abstract

State-of-the-art approaches for reporting performance analysis results rely on charts providing insights on the performance of the system, often organized in dashboards. The insights are usually data-driven, i.e., not directly connected to the performance concern leading the users to execute the performance engineering activity, thus limiting the understandability of the provided result. A cause is that the data is presented without further explanations. To solve this problem, we propose a concern-driven approach for reporting of performance evaluation results, shaped around a performance concern stated by a stakeholder and captured by state-of-the-art declarative performance engineering specifications. Starting from the available performance analysis, the approach automatically generates a customized performance report providing a chart- and natural-language-based answer to the concern. In this paper, we introduce the general concept of concern-driven performance analysis reporting and present a first prototype implementation of the approach. We envision that, by applying our approach, reports tailored to user concerns reduce the effort to analyze performance evaluation results.