Thesis Research Project Adrian Streitz

Performance Awareness for Enterprise Application Developments by the Example of SAP ABAP

Adrian Streitz

Aim: The main contribution of this thesis is the enablement of performance awareness for software developers of SAP ABAP enterprise applications. The consideration of performance issues is integrated within the development process and leads to an early adoption of ABAP source code.

Abstract: Efficient running business processes form a foundation to achieve competitive advantage. If conducted, software performance evaluations are postponed to the end of software projects due to immense overhead for developers during the implementation phase. As long as software evaluation stays complex and time-consuming, it is rarely accepted in practice. The thesis tackles this problem and presents an approach to introduce Performance Awareness for SAP Enterprise Applications within the integrated development environment (IDE) Eclipse. In particular, our approach utilizes automatically derived performance models and predicts response time of applied operations based on simulations. Static code analysis on source code results in an abstract syntax structure and is transformed into a performance model with control flows and calls to other functions. In order to obtain accurate prediction results, the generated performance model is parameterized with available monitoring information from the SAP Application Server. The resulted feedback is provided to the developer by presenting the estimated response time in the Eclipse IDE. Eventually, we confirm our assumptions by a controlled experiment with students and professional software developers where study participants performed maintenance tasks using our approach.