INFORM: A Framework for Performance Informed Software Development

Abstract

INFORM is a framework that provides J2EE application developers with an indication of how their code will perform whilst they are writing it. At present, software developers, especially those who are new to a development team, have little or no knowledge of how their changes to existing code impacts the response times of an application. For example, if a developer inappropriately utilises a high performance overhead service as part of their solution, their changes could have drastic negative consequences in terms of the QoS of the component. The goal of the INFORM framework is to collate performance information obtained from simulated workloads, model it and make it easily accessible to developers within their development environment, helping them to make better performance decisions whilst they are coding