Tracking performance failures with rizel

Abstract

Understanding and minimizing the impact of software changes on performance are both challenging and essential when developing software. Unfortunately, current code execution profilers do not offer efficient abstractions and adequate representations to keep track of performance across multiple versions. Consequently, understanding the cause of a slow execution stemming from a software evolution is often realized in an ad hoc fashion. We have designed Rizel, a code profiler that identifies the root of performance variations thanks to an expressive and intuitive visual representation. Rizel highlights variation of executions and time distribution between multiple software versions. Rizel is available for the Pharo programming language under the MIT License.