Instrumentation effort:

The ARM API does not provide any kind of tool support to provide automation. It simply offers an API and leaves it up to the application developer to do the entire instrumentation manually. Not even a methodology is given to aid the application developer in finding the places suitable for instrumentation. Thus the development effort is high and impedes widespread use of this promising technique.

Our approach in contrast delivers a high degree of automation. The management instrumentation of an application is done almost automatically. Only the user interactions that start and end user transactions have to be declared by the application developer. This is done during customization and does not require the application developer to insert any kind of code into the application. The instrumentation of subtransactions is automated entirely.

The additional effort posed on component developers can easily be tolerated, as only two classes of components require special instrumentation and a high degree of reuse can be expected for these components (especially for GUI components).