dqualizer Research Project

The runtime quality of application systems - e.g. in terms of performance, reliability and resilience - has a direct influence on the business success of companies in a wide range of technical domains. As a result, it is important to continuously monitor, evaluate and, if necessary, improve runtime quality through analysis measures. Over the last few years, corresponding analysis measures such as load tests or monitoring have become widespread in practice and mature commercial and open-source tools have been developed. However, these measures are all located at the technical level and are not interpreted at the domain an level. At the same time, software architecture and software development approaches such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), which are becoming increasingly widespread, essentially do not consider runtime quality concerns despite their criticality.

The research project dqualizer of Novatec Consulting GmbH and the University of Hamburg aims at closing this gap between the domain-specificity of application systems and the (technical) measures and findings of quality assurance by means of a domain-centric approach. For this purpose, possibilities for modeling and monitoring runtime quality concerns are to be integrated into DDD-based techniques. From a domain perspective, meaningful load and resilience tests can be automatically generated and interpreted by dqualizer and the links to technical monitoring can be established. The innovative concepts developed are to be implemented in an open source tool and made available and usable in connection with existing tools.

The connection of the joint research project of Novatec Consulting GmbH and the University of Hamburg with industry partners is intended to establish the link to practice and evaluate the approach using real case studies in the complex technical domains of insurance and payroll/tax accounting and the corresponding technical environments. The case studies will be provided by the associated application partners. The consortium is already working together in various sub-constellations. Novatec can expand its offering through dqualizer into both business-driven architecture consulting and runtime quality analysis, and in particular merge the two areas. For the University of Hamburg, there are extensive opportunities for exploiting the results in research and teaching.