Towards Holistic Continuous Software Performance Assessment

In agile, fast and continuous development lifecycles, software performance analysis is fundamental to confidently release continuously improved software versions. Researchers and industry practitioners have identified the importance of integrating performance testing in agile development processes in a timely and efficient way. However, existing techniques are fragmented and not integrated taking into account the heterogeneous skills of the users developing polyglot distributed software, and their need to automate performance practices as they are integrated in the whole lifecycle without breaking its intrinsic velocity. In this paper we present our vision for holistic continuous software performance assessment, which is being implemented in the BenchFlow tool. BenchFlow enables performance testing and analysis practices to be pervasively integrated in continuous development lifecycle activities. Users can specify performance activities (e.g., standard performance tests) by relying on an expressive Domain Specific Language for objective-driven performance analysis. Collected performance knowledge can be thus reused to speed up performance activities throughout the entire process.