Gaining confidence on dependability benchmarks conclusions through back-to-back testing

Abstract

The main goal of any benchmark is to guide decisions through system ranking, but surprisingly little research has been focused so far on providing means to gain confidence on the analysis carried out with benchmark results. The inclusion of a back-to-back testing approach in the benchmark analysis process to compare conclusions and gain confidence on the final adopted choices seems convenient to cope with this challenge. The proposal is to look for the coherence of rankings issued from the application of independent multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques on results. Although any MCDM method can be potentially used, this paper reports our experience using the Logic Score of Preferences (LSP) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Discrepancies in provided rankings invalidate conclusions and must be tracked to discover incoherences and correct the related analysis errors. Once rankings are coherent, the underlying analysis also does, thus increasing our confidence on supplied conclusions.