Abstract
The increasing complexity of software and its pervasiveness in everyday life has in the last years motivated growing interest for software analysis. This has mainly been directed to assess functional properties of the software systems (related to their structure and their behavior) and, in the case of safety critical systems, dependability properties. The quantitative behavior of a software system has gained relevance only recently with the advent of software performance analysis. This kind of analysis aims at assessing the quantitative behavior of a software system by comprehensively analyzing its structure and its behavior, from design to code. In this chapter we introduce the concepts and definitions that will be used throughout the entire book.
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Notes
- 1.
We do not enter in specific aspects of dependability, because it is not the focus of this book, however, we provide this definition to better place performance in the non-functional domain of software.
- 2.
When addressing security, an additional attribute has great prominence, confidentiality, that is, the absence of unauthorized disclosure of information. Security is a composite of the attributes of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, requiring the concurrent existence of: (i) availability for authorized actions only, (ii) confidentiality, and (iii) integrity with improper meaning unauthorized.
- 3.
EGs were in fact created as a notation to model the software dynamics and the resource demands that the software makes to the underlying platform (see Chap. 3 for a description of Execution Graphs).
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Cortellessa, V., Di Marco, A., Inverardi, P. (2011). What Is Software Performance?. In: Model-Based Software Performance Analysis. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13621-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13621-4_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13620-7
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