Propean, a RT-UML based approach to help manager's decision-making

We pursue the usage of classical performance engineering to aid the project manager in making sound, reliable schedule predictions, and in optimizing personnel utilization during software development. We assimilate the project teams to the processing elements of a performance model, and their activities to the tasks to be accomplished within established time intervals. We then show how by means of basic performance analyses, different workflow assumptions can be explored and their consequent outcomes automatically derived: by looking at the analysis results, the manager can thus take an informed, more responsible decision. The proposed approach is called Propean (for Project Performance Analysis). To use Propean, the manager does not need to be an expert of performance modeling notations as we provide a front-end interface based on a subset of Real-Time UML, the OMG standard profile specialized for schedulability, performance and timeliness. To illustrate Propean application, in this paper we model the case of a manager that must decide a release date for a product undergoing the testing phase.