Design of XMI-based tools for building EQN models of software systems

Research in software development is proving that model building during product development is essential to product validation. Indeed the model can be used in the early stages of the product lifecycle to predict the product compliance with the user performance requirements. This paper deals with software performance model building. Only a few methods and tools have been introduced for performance model automatic building, which would be of great interest to software developers, since existing performance methods and tools require a deep knowledge of performance theory. This paper illustrates the design of a tool for automatically building software performance models. The produced model is a queueing network. The design is based on recently published standards like MOF and XMI, that facilitate the easy interchange of models between different tools (e.g., software development tools, evaluation tools, etc.).