Understanding Software Performance Challenges an Empirical Study on Stack Overflow

Performance is a quality aspect describing how the software is performing. Any performance degradation will further affect other quality aspects, such as usability. Software developers continuously conduct testing to ensure that code addition or changes do not damage existing functionalities or negatively affect the quality. Hence, developers set strategies to detect, locate and fix the regression if needed. In this paper, we provide an exploratory study on the challenges developers face in resolving performance regression. The study is based on the questions posted on a technical forum directed to performance regression. We collected 1828 questions discussing the regression of software execution time. All those questions are manually analyzed. The study resulted in a categorization of the challenges. We also discussed the difficulty level of performance regression issues within the developers community. This study provides insights to help developers during the software design and implementation to avoid regression causes.