Performance, Maintainability and Implementation Cost for Different Software Platforms in a Network Management System

Abstract: Context: Software architecture is an emerging field and progressively more popular in software engineering. Software architecture has become an essential part in development of software systems. Prototyping is possibly one of the most commonly used learning paradigms in software architecture. Hence, it is reasonable to accept some of the requirements that could be expressed as specific quality attributes for developing and comparative analysis of prototype. In this thesis we deal with software architecture based on different prototypes, where the different platforms have been shared canonical within the software architecture. It also has a good potential for performance intensification to analyze the prototype according to the required quality attributes. Objectives: In this study, we investigate the significance of quality attributes such as performance, maintainability and implementation cost of different software platforms. Mainly, it is focused on integration of prototypes in software architecture. We specifically investigate several challenges being faced by the organizations in the maintainability for addressing the challenges in prototype of network management system using software platforms. Methods: In this study, both theoretical and empirical research methods have been applied. In order to accomplish the goal of this thesis, literature review in this research has performed by studying articles from several sources and also performed snowball sampling method to decrease the chance of missing any relevant article. During literature review, we have analyzed learning structure and workflow of prototypes and then incorporated quality attributes by theoretical analysis. In the experiment part, three prototypes were built by deploying different software platforms such as PHP, JSP and Perl. Each of these prototypes was evaluated with respect to maintainability using twenty five surveys from industrial experts, implementation cost in number of hours and performance in terms of response time. Results: As a result of our study, we have identified different challenges in software architecture and practicing in software prototypes by using different software platforms. By this study we analyze the performance, maintainability and implementation cost for different software platforms. Survey has been conducted to recognize challenges and practices in maintainability of prototypes. We have shown the possibility to achieve better quality attributes given to a certain system. Conclusions: There is trade-off, the best implementation alternative depends on how important the different quality attributes are in a certain situation.