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Using feature locality: can we leverage history to avoid failures during reconfiguration?

Authors:

Brady J. Garvin,

Matthew B. DwyerAuthors Info & Claims

ASAS '11: Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Assurances for self-adaptive systems

Pages 24 - 33

https://doi.org/10.1145/2024436.2024443

Published: 04 September 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Despite the best efforts of software engineers, faults still escape into deployed software. Developers need time to prepare and distribute fixes, and in the interim deployments must either tolerate or avoid failures. Self-adaptive systems, systems that adapt to meet changing requirements in a dynamic environment, have a daunting task if their reconfiguration involves adding or removing functional features, because configurable software is known to suffer from failures that appear only under certain feature combinations.

Although configuration-dependent failures may be difficult to provoke, and thus hard to detect in testing, we posit that they also constitute opportunities for reconfiguration to increase system reliability. We further conjecture that the failures that are sensitive to a system configuration depend on similar feature combinations, a phenomenon we call feature-locality, and that this locality can be combined with historical data to predict failure-prone configurations. In a case study on 128 failures reported against released versions of an open source configurable system, we find evidence to support our hypothesis. We show that only a small number of features affect the visibility of these failures, and that over time we can learn these features to avoid future failures.

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Cited By

Siqueira BFerrari FSouza KCamargo Vde Lemos R(2021)Testing of adaptive and context‐aware systems: approaches and challengesSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.177231:7Online publication date: 3-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1772
Medeiros FRibeiro MGheyi RBraz LKästner CApel SSantos KCavalcante EDantas FBatista T(2020)An Empirical Study on Configuration-Related Code WeaknessesProceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3422392.3422409(193-202)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3422392.3422409
Sayagh MKerzazi NAdams BPetrillo F(2020)Software Configuration Engineering in Practice Interviews, Survey, and Systematic Literature ReviewIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2018.286784746:6(646-673)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2867847
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Using feature locality: can we leverage history to avoid failures during reconfiguration?
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASAS '11: Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Assurances for self-adaptive systems

September 2011

50 pages

ISBN:9781450308533

DOI:10.1145/2024436

General Chairs:
Javier Cámara
University of Coimbra, Portugal
,
Rogßrio de Lemos
University of Kent, UK
,
Carlo Ghezzi
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
,
Antónia Lopes
University of Lisbon, Portugal

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 04 September 2011

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SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE'11: Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

September 4, 2011

Szeged, Hungary

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Cited By

Siqueira BFerrari FSouza KCamargo Vde Lemos R(2021)Testing of adaptive and context‐aware systems: approaches and challengesSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.177231:7Online publication date: 3-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1772
Medeiros FRibeiro MGheyi RBraz LKästner CApel SSantos KCavalcante EDantas FBatista T(2020)An Empirical Study on Configuration-Related Code WeaknessesProceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3422392.3422409(193-202)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3422392.3422409
Sayagh MKerzazi NAdams BPetrillo F(2020)Software Configuration Engineering in Practice Interviews, Survey, and Systematic Literature ReviewIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2018.286784746:6(646-673)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2867847
Akber ARizvi SKhan MUddin VHashmani MAhmad J(2019)Dimensions of Robust Security Testing in Global Software EngineeringHuman Factors in Global Software Engineering10.4018/978-1-5225-9448-2.ch010(252-272)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-9448-2.ch010
Mo RCai YKazman RFeng QKhomh FRoy CSiegmund J(2018)Assessing an architecture's ability to support feature evolutionProceedings of the 26th Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3196321.3196346(297-307)Online publication date: 28-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3196321.3196346
Monperrus M(2018)Automatic Software RepairACM Computing Surveys10.1145/310590651:1(1-24)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3105906
McGee EMcGregor J(2016)Using dynamic adaptive systems in safety-critical domainsProceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems10.1145/2897053.2897062(115-121)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2897053.2897062
Felderer MBüchler MJohns MBrucker ABreu RPretschner A(2016)Security Testing10.1016/bs.adcom.2015.11.003(1-51)Online publication date: 2016
https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adcom.2015.11.003
Medeiros FRodrigues IRibeiro MTeixeira LGheyi R(2015)An empirical study on configuration-related issues: investigating undeclared and unused identifiersACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2936314.281420651:3(35-44)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2936314.2814206
Medeiros FRodrigues IRibeiro MTeixeira LGheyi RKästner CGokhālé A(2015)An empirical study on configuration-related issues: investigating undeclared and unused identifiersProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/2814204.2814206(35-44)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2814204.2814206
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