Automated root cause isolation of performance regressions during software development

Performance is crucial for the success of an application. To build responsive and cost efficient applications, software engineers must be able to detect and fix performance problems early in the development process. Existing approaches are either relying on a high level of abstraction such that critical problems cannot be detected or require high manual effort. In this paper, we present a novel approach that integrates performance regression root cause analysis into the existing development infrastructure using performance-aware unit tests and the revision history. Our approach is easy to use and provides software engineers immediate insights with automated root cause analysis. In a realistic case study based on the change history of Apache Commons Math, we demonstrate that our approach can automatically detect and identify the root cause of a major performance regression.