| Abstract |
Welcome to the Third Internation Workshop on Software and Performance! WOSP 2002 provides a forum for the growing community of researchers interested in performance analysis of software systems, in all stages of software development, from requirements definition, to software architecture specification, to design and coding. "Performance analysis" is to be understood in the very broader sense of analysing the non-functional quantitative aspects of software systems.WOSP 2002 is the first conference in the series that is being held outside of North America. The earlier conferences, WOSP '98 in Santa Fe, NM, and WOSP '00 in Ottawa, Canada, were very successful and identified many gaps in available practices and tools as well as many opportunities for stimulating research.The concerns of WOSP cover research on techniques and methods for designing software with predictable performance characteristics, build-in predictable, tracking of performance issues through the development and deployment of systems, and understanding the sources of performance failures. Modem distributed applications, such as Internet-centric or Web-centric applications, add new previously unforeseen challenges. They generally consist of multiple (fixed or mobile) nodes, distributed over a wide area, controlled by different administrative domains, with heterogeneous and intermittent connections. The complexity of such applications greatly increases the need for methodologies and tools that help us evaluate the performance characteristics of design alternatives early in the development process.This need is evident in the WOSP 2002 program, which includes papers on methods, measures and tools for quantitative analysis of standard wired communication systems, mobile systems communication and interaction paradigms, software architectures and middleware applications.The previous WOSP facilitated the formation of a stable community of dedicated software engineers, developers, performance analysts, and modellers. They are creating new tools and methods to address the challenges of increasing system complexity, rapidly evolving software technologies, reduced time to market demands, incomplete documentation, and poorly defined requirements.In response to the call for papers, sixty-four papers from 20 different countries ail over the world, were submitted to WOSP 2002. The papers were grouped into three categories: full papers, experience papers, and position papers. They underwent a rigorous peer review process, with at least three Program Committee members reviewing each paper and with thorough discussion of the reviews. During an electronic Program Committee meeting, the Program Committee selected the 35 papers included in the final program, with 18 categorized as full and experience papers, 14 as short papers and 3 position papers.The WOSP 2002 program encompasses research papers, invited speakers, poster papers, position papers and three workshop open discussion sessions on issues relevant to the conference. The result is an amalgamation of software and performance practices, as well as industrial and research perspectives. The conference also includes a joint session with the co-located International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2002). The joint morning with ISSTA features an invited talk by Prof. Ed Brinksma on integrating qualitative and quantitative validation of software systems followed by a combined ISSTA and WOSP research paper sessions. The keynote by Prof. Danny Menasce on the nature of Software, Performance, and Engineering sheds light on the reasons of software performance failures. |
