The term “non-functional requirements” lumps together many diverse architecture and design concerns and parameters which have little in common with one another except that they are beyond what can be readily expressed in current architecture and design modeling techniques (e.g., UML).

This session will focus on one class of non-functional requirements: performance-critical concerns. Performance-critical concerns are often crucial design drivers for today’s software-intensive systems; particularly real-time and embedded systems. The ability to model such concerns has potential impact on:

• capture and specification of performance expectations;
• performance aggregate analysis and prediction;
• architecture feasibility analysis;
• resource characterization, management, allocation and utilization;
• mission criticality: availability, fault-tolerance, and quality of service;
• model consistency (e.g., between diagrams, models, views and layers);
• conformance (e.g., expected versus implemented);
• impact of successive implementation refinement on performance analysis and conformance; and
• making informed architectural design trade-offs.

The goal of this session will be to assess interest in initiating work in this area, in the form of an interest or working group or a future series of meetings.

We are interested to identify limitations of current techniques, to suggest improvements to practices and to help the combined tool, process, project and vendor communities to provide a more robust framework for practitioners in the construction of performance-critical systems.

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