Effectiveness of Performance Visualizations for Declarative Model Transformations

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Several profilers for general-purpose languages like Java offer visualizations to support users in understanding the execution of a program and identifying the causes of a performance issue. Unfortunately, these performance visualizations are difficult to reuse in profilers for declarative model transformations since they cannot display transformation-specific information. For example, a profiler for a declarative model transformation language must provide information on the traversal of the input model since it impacts the performance but is hidden from the developer. Moreover, the respective visualization must scale for input models that consist of several thousand model elements. Hence, we developed performance visualizations for the declarative model transformation language Henshin that provide insights into the transformation execution. Subsequently, we performed a mixed methods study with 18 Henshin novices to evaluate the effectiveness of our visualizations. In our study, the participants tried to improve the execution performance of four transformations by performing a root cause analysis using our visualizations. The results of our study show that depending on the task, between 16 and 18 participants understood the execution of a transformation correctly based on our visualizations. Moreover, between 12 and 18 participants proposed effective optimizations using our visualizations.