Guest Editorial: Automation in Software Performance Engineering

Excerpt

This special issue on “Automation in Software Performance Engineering” was initially conceived at the light of the 5th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2014). We envisioned to offer a chance for improvement to those papers addressing the topic of automation. However, once launched, the Call for Papers attracted researchers and works beyond the Conference. The field of Software Performance Engineering focuses interest on quantitative evaluation of modern software systems (data-intensive, autonomous, ubiquitous, mobile, distributed, adaptive, embedded) and the trade-offs among performance and other quality of service (QoS) attributes (e.g., security, reliability or availability). Performance engineering methods, methodologies, and techniques have been developed for system evaluation. However, systematic application and automation of performance engineering for the modeling, evaluation, and assessment of industrial level software systems is still an open challenge that this special issue tries to address. Finally, this issue in particular presents four state of the art works that address automation challenges in Performance Testing, Cloud Performance, and Tools for Software Performance. …