Design Alternatives

Design alternatives are present in virtually every software development project; independent whether of whole software system or only a smaller component is being developed. For example, introducing a cache or not, choosing the fast component for EUR 30,000 or the slow component for EUR 10,000, parallely process request or queue them (just to name a few) – all these design alternatives are hard to evaluate with respect to performance, reliability, maintainability, or costs.

Furthermore, typical design alternatives are combinations of individuals decisions. It is almost impossible for humans to predict the impact of combined design decisions or quantify them. Palladio calculates the impact of design decisions for you: automated and at the model level. You are not forced to implement all design alternatives but can select the most appropriate one.

Palladio simulates the impact of your design decisions for all design alternatives and helps you to select the right (e.g. fasted, most reliable, cheapest) one for you.

Palladio answers which design alternative to chose

• Design and engineer new applications and new components: Is it worth spending 15,000 EUR for load balancer hardware or will 1,000 EUR for software caching be sufficient?
• Bottleneck avoidance: Do we design a potential bottleneck when using a non-threaded sorting component?
• Design optimisation: Which size should our SQL connection pool have?