Autonomous compliance monitoring of non-functional properties

Abstract

While there is a good understanding of functional requirements and the need to test them during development, non-functional requirements are more elusive. Defining non-functional requirements can end up in a major undertaking consuming significant resources. Even after defining non-functional requirements, chances are they do not reflect the real-world usage of a deployed system. Differences can occur due to workload, hardware, or utilised third-party libraries. To tackle these challenges we propose a fully automatic compliance monitoring solution for non-functional properties. The proposed system mines stable behavioural patterns of the system and automatically extracts assertions that can be used to detect deviations of expected non-functional behaviour. We especially focus on non-functional properties that require runtime observation, e.g. execution time, performance, throughput.The full automation of the process enables a deployment in the field, giving rise to a distributed non-functional behaviour extraction system.