This course is a "special topics" course with changing topics every year. The course is held in a seminar style, and intended for a small group of highly motivated students.

In 2025, the topic for the course is going to be software performance measurement and optimization. The main teacher for this year is going to be Philipp Leitner.

The course will cover three to four types of performance engineering activities:

Analytical performance engineering (e.g., theoretical performance models, such as queueing theory or Petri nets)
Experimental performance engineering (stress and load testing, microbenchmarking)
Observational performance engineering (monitoring, canary releases, etc.)
Potentially compiler optimization

The course will not cover real-time systems, or systems with hardware-level performance guarantees.

Planned teaching activities:

The goal of the course will be for the students to collaboratively create a performance engineering "text book" covering the topics mentioned above. Students will work in teams (likely 2-3 students, potentially more depending on size of the class) and each team will research and summarize one subarea of the scope mentioned above. Each team will (a) write and revise a chapter on their topic, and (b) present their findings to the rest of the class in a 30 minute lecture.

Tentative schedule:

First week: Introduction to the course area, team formation, topic assignment
Second and third week: active work on the project, submission of outline and planned literature list
Fourth and fifth week: active work on the project, submission of first chapter drafts
Sixth week: work on lecture materials, reviewing chapters of other teams (each team will review two other chapters)
Seventh and eight week: revisions based on received feedback, class lectures, final submissions