Proactive Software Performance Assurance in ERA

时代环保(ERA)提供世界领先的软件解决方案，以应对与量化环境影响和简化制造设施的监管报告相关的挑战。ERA软件的性能已经成为提供优质服务的一个重要方面。不仅对ERA来说，超大规模系统的性能已经成为一个新兴的和极其重要的话题。执行性能保证活动通常是为了识别和消除性能问题。这些问题可能会影响用户体验，增加系统的运行成本，并导致现场故障。尽管自动化和高效的性能保证活动取得了进展，但在现代软件开发中进行性能保证活动面临着巨大的挑战。首先，业绩保证活动仍然是一项事后进行的任务。然而，在开发周期的后期阶段，需要大量资源来检测、定位、了解和修复性能问题。此外，性能保证活动通常是以特殊方式设计的，没有考虑最终用户的知识，导致对最终用户没有意义的问题或实际生活中不具代表性的性能问题。在这个项目中，我们建议通过提供主动的检测和诊断方法来提高ERA大型软件解决方案的性能保证活动的最新水平。特别是，我们提出了两个研究目标：1)主动性能评估和预测；2)主动性能测试策略。该项目的结果将大大改进ERA的业绩保证活动以及加拿大和全球的一般软件工程做法。

ERA environmental (ERA) provides the world-leading software solutions to cope with the challenges that are associated with quantifying the environmental impact and simplifying manufacturing facilities' regulatory reporting. The performance of ERA's software has become an important aspect to provide quality services. Not just for ERA, the performance of ultra-large-scale systems have been an emerging and an extremely important topic. Performance assurance activities are typically conducted to identify and eliminate performance issues. Such issues may compromise the user experience, increase the operating cost of the system, and cause field failures. Despite the advances towards automated and efficient performance assurance activities, conducting performance assurance activities in the modern software development is facing great challenges. First of all, performance assurance activities remains a task that is conducted after fact. However, large amounts of resources are required to detect, locate, understand and fix performance issues at such a late stage in the development circle. In addition, performance assurance activities are often designed in an ad hoc manner without considering the knowledge from the end users, leading to non-meaningful issues for the end users or non-representative issues of real-life performance. In this project, we propose to improve the state-of-the-art of performance assurance activities of ERA's large-scale software solutions by provide proactive detection and diagnosis approaches. In particular, we propose two research objectives: 1) Proactive performance evaluation and prediction and 2) Proactive performance testing strategies. The outcome of the project will significantly improve the performance assurance activities in ERA as well as general software engineering practices in Canada and globally.