Proactive Software Performance Assurance in ERA

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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.