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With growing interest in distributed computing come demands for techniques to aid in development of correct and reliable distributed software. Controlling, or at least recognizing, complexity of such software is an important part of the development and maintenance process. While a number of metrics have been proposed for quantitatively measuring the complexity of sequential, centralized programs, corresponding metrics for distributed software are noticeable by their absence. Using Ada as a representative distributed programming language, this paper discusses some ideas on complexity metrics that focus on Ada tasking and rendezvous. Concurrently active rendezvous are claimed to be an important aspect of communication complexity. A Petri net graph model of Ada rendezvous is used to introduce a "rendezvous graph," an abstraction that can be useful in viewing and computing effective communication complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software Performance Engineering (SPE) provides an approach to constructing systems to meet performance objectives. This paper illustrates the application of SPE to an example with some real-time properties and demonstrates how to compare performance characteristics of design alternatives. We show how SPE can be integrated with design methods and demonstrate that performance requirements can be achieved without sacrificing other desirable design qualities such as understandability, maintainability, and reusability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]