  Since its initiation by Connie Smith, the process of Software Performance
Engineering (SPE) is becoming a growing concern. The idea is to bring
performance evaluation into the software design process. This suitable
methodology allows software designers to determine the performance of software
during design. Several approaches have been proposed to provide such
techniques. Some of them propose to derive from a UML (Unified Modeling
Language) model a performance model such as Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) or
Stochastic process Algebra (SPA) models. Our work belongs to the same category.
We propose to derive from a UML model a Stochastic Automata Network (SAN) in
order to obtain performance predictions. Our approach is more flexible due to
the SAN modularity and its high resemblance to UML' state-chart diagram.
