Performance efficiency

Performance efficiency is the performance a product or system delivers relative to the amount of resources it consumes to achieve it, under stated conditions. It is a quality attribute and one of the eight top-level characteristics in the ISO/IEC 25010 quality model, alongside others such as usability and maintainability.

The resources being spent aren’t limited to compute. They can include other software the system depends on, its hardware and software configuration, and even physical materials such as printer paper or storage media.

ISO/IEC 25010 decomposes performance efficiency into three sub-characteristics: time behaviour, covering response and processing times and throughput; resource utilization, covering the amounts and types of resources consumed; and capacity, the maximum limits a system can handle.

References

• ISO/IEC (2023). ISO/IEC 25010:2023 — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) — Quality model.