A study on managing the performance requirements of a distributed service delivery software system

Like other non-functional requirements (NFR), performance requirements can have global impact on a system. This article presents a preliminary study on the management of performance requirements of a distributed service delivery (DSD) system using the 'Performance Requirement Framework (PeRF)' developed by Nixon [B.A. Nixon, Management of performance requirements for information systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 20 (12), (2000)]. Various steps in the framework are explained in the context of the DSD system, and the effects of some design decisions on the performance have been evaluated. PeRF was originally developed for information systems. The article shows how the framework can be adapted to a distributed system. However, additional studies on a number of distributed systems need to be carried out in order to develop a full framework for performance requirements for distributed systems, or perhaps for different categories of such systems.