To meet end-user performance expectations, precise performance requirements are needed during development and testing, e.g., to conduct detailed performance and load tests. However, in practice, several factors complicate performance requirements elicitation: lacking skills in performance requirements engineering, outdated or unavailable functional specifications and architecture models, the specification of the system's context, lack of experience to collect good performance requirements in an industrial setting with very limited time, etc. From the small set of available non-functional requirements engineering methods, no method exists that alone leads to precise and complete performance requirements with feasible effort and which has been reported to work in an industrial setting. In this paper, we present our experiences in combining existing requirements engineering methods into a performance requirements method called PROPRE. It has been designed to require no up-to-date system documentation and to be applicable with limited time and effort. We have successfully applied PROPRE in an industrial case study from the process automation domain. Our lessons learned show that the stakeholders gathered good performance requirements which now improve performance testing.

Agreements for sharing of software between entities in a corporation have to be tailored to fit the situation. Such agreements are not legal documents and must address different issues than traditional software licenses. We found that these agreements should cover what is granted, payment, support, ownership and liability. In a case study we learned that an agreement should list its assumptions on the structure and processes of the software organization. The presented work enables others to create guidelines for software sharing agreements tailored to their organization and shares lessons about the differences between software product lines and corporate software sharing and reuse.

In a large corporate organization there are sometimes similar software products in certain subdomains with a perceived functional overlap. This promises to be an opportunity for systematic reuse to reduce software development and maintenance costs. In such situations companies have used different domain analysis approaches (e.g., SEI Technical Probe) that helped to assess technical and organizational potential for a software product line approach. We applied existing domain analysis approaches for software product line engineering and tailored them to include a feature analysis as well as architecture evaluation. In this paper, we report our experiences from applying the approach in two subdomains of industrial automation.

Determining the trade-off between performance and costs of a distributed software system is important as it enables fulfilling performance requirements in a cost-efficient way. The large amount of design alternatives for such systems often leads software architects to select a suboptimal solution, which may either waste resources or cannot cope with future workloads. Recently, several approaches have appeared to assist software architects with this design task. In this paper, we present a case study applying one of these approaches, i.e. PerOpteryx, to explore the design space of an existing industrial distributed software system from ABB. To facilitate the design exploration, we created a highly detailed performance and cost model, which was instrumental in determining a cost-efficient architecture solution using an evolutionary algorithm. The case study demonstrates the capabilities of various modern performance modeling tools and a design space exploration tool in an industrial setting,provides lessons learned, and helps other software architects in solving similar problems.