Proactive Software Performance Assurance in ERA

ERA环境（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监管报告相关的挑战。ERA软件的性能已成为提供优质服务的一个重要方面。不仅仅是对ERA来说，超大规模系统的性能已经成为一个新兴的、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。尽管在自动化和高效的性能保证活动方面取得了进展，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，性能保证活动仍然是事后执行的任务。然而，在开发周期的这样一个后期阶段，需要大量的资源来检测、定位、理解和修复性能问题。此外，性能保证活动通常以特别的方式设计，而不考虑最终用户的知识，从而导致对最终用户没有意义的问题或对实际性能没有代表性的问题。在这个项目中，我们建议通过提供主动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水平。我们特别提出了两个研究目标：1)主动性能评估与预测；2)主动性能测试策略。该项目的结果将显著改善ERA的性能保证活动，以及加拿大和全球的一般软件工程实践。

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.