Research On Performance Testing Based On UML Sequence Diagram

With the sharply increase of software system, the requirements of software's quality are getting more and more strict. And as the most important measure to assure the quality, performance testing is gaining more attention. At the same time, UML-based software design method has become a industrial standard in fact. Therefore, a perfect performance testing solution is required, whose information can be obtained from UML models, to analyze and detect potential performance bug or performance bottleneck.The limitations of software performance engineering are discussed in this paper. Then we pay more attention to the performance basic and the phases of software development process, and present a performance testing method in software design phase, where the UML sequence diagram and other UML criterions are considered.The method is made up of two models: sequence diagram and active executable graph. In the first stage, a UML sequence diagram is transformed to an active executable graph. In the second stage, the performance analysis is carried out on the active executable graph. Moreover, we explore how to formalize the models and how to obtain the active executable graph from sequence diagram. In addition, we describe the structure of the active executable graph and the algorithm which finished the transformation from sequence diagram to executable graph, and the performance analysis or testing can be implemented even for complex sequence diagram with fragment labels.The paper presents two different performance analysis methods which are related to single user and multi-user. The system response time is taken as the standard for the single user case, and hardware resource using ratio is considered under the multi-user case. According to above analysis, we developed a performance test system, whose input is XMI format-based UML model files, to generate performance testing results. As a result, software performance can be tested and analyzed in the early life cycle with ordinary and effective method. The experiment result proved that the system is useful and significant.