Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Platform-applications are applications that make use of the various services provided by Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) platforms. Examples of such applications include BlackBerry or Android mobile applications, and applications that are developed on top of Google's App Engine, or ones that make use of Evernote's infrastructure. Such applications must be ready to cope with a very large user base. However, developers of such applications have limited experience in planning and testing for large user bases. Moreover, the developers have limited resources to perform such testing. The goal of this research project is to improve the quality of such platform-applications. We will develop tools and processes to enable the verification of such applications before they are deployed on top of ULS platforms. Such verification will ensure that the platform-applications provide a good user experience and that the applications do not negatively impact the ULS platform on top of which they run. The proposed research program will lead to large improvements in the quality and scalability of platform-applications in a cost-effective manner. Many of these applications are developed by Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) with limited resources to perform such type of in-depth testing and with limited research budgets. All too often such applications are deployed without ever being tested at scale. Such un-tested deployments negatively impact the SME and the operators of ULS platforms. For example, the rapid growth of a badly-designed platform-application often impacts other applications on the same platform. Both the industrial (BlackBerry) and academic (SAIL) partners are world-recognized leaders in the performance analysis and verification of ULS platforms with over a decade of experience working on optimizing and testing the performance of such platforms. The research builds on their extensive experience and will train nine HQPs in software performance engineering, load testing, empirical software engineering, and essential communication and presentation skills.