Experiences of Performance Tuning Software Product Family Architectures Using a Scenario-Driven Approach

Performance is an important non functional quality attribute of a software system. The ability to deliver the expected performance objectives comes from a careful design and attention to detail. Unfortunately, performance is not always considered at the beginning. However, once built, software performance can still be improved by evaluating and tuning the software architecture.When analyzing the performance of a software product family, an understanding of its architectural properties is needed. A software product family architecture’s strength is based on common assets, platforms and source code shared by its family members. Software product family design allows improved time-to-market, software quality and software reuse. At the same time, variability is the factor to instantiate different products and the handling of the variation points must be carefully managed. In this paper I present a scenario-driven approach for analyzing the performance of software product family architectures. The process of performance tuning has been applied to a Nokia software product family architecture and two case studies are presented. The evaluation process and the tradeoffs of evaluating software product family architectures are discussed.