Abstract

Model-driven engineering (MDE) techniques areincreasingly being used to address many of the developmentand operational lifecycle concerns of large-scale component-basedsystems. One such concern that is growing in importance, butlacking significant research is the validation of quality-of-service(QoS) properties of component-based systems throughout theirdevelopment lifecycle. In the current state of the art, large-scalecomponent-based systems have to wait until system integrationtime to perform in-depth QoS testing, which can be too late anddetrimental to project schedules and costs. This paper describesour novel MDE-based solution to address this challenge. Atthe core of our solution approach are (1) a set of domainspecificmodeling languages that allow us to mimic component“business logic,” and (2) a generative programming frameworkthat synthesizes configuration files for system simulation. Aparticular thrust of this paper is describing the syntax andsemantics of the component behavior modeling language, whichare based on the Input/Output automaton formalism.Our experience shows that our techniques enable developersof large-scale component-based systems to perform early QoSevaluation from development time to production time. Moreover,our experience shows we are able to provide an environmentwhere developers can rapidly test ideas and methodologieslargely alleviating the need to expend effort, money, and timeimplementing them.