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Failure Avoidance in Configurable Systems through Feature Locality

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Assurances for Self-Adaptive Systems

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7740))

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 avoid failures or endure their consequences. Self-adaptive systems–systems that adapt to changes internally, in requirements, and in a dynamic environment– can often handle these challenges automatically, depending on the nature of the failures.

Those self-adaptive systems where functional features can be added or removed also constitute configurable systems. Configurable software is known to suffer from failures that appear only under certain feature combinations, and these failures are particularly challenging for testers, who must find suitable configurations as well as inputs to detect them. However, these elusive failures seem well suited for avoidance by self-adaptation. We need only find an alternative configuration that precludes the failure without derailing the current use case.

This work investigates that possibility, along with some further conjectures: that the failures that are sensitive to a system’s configuration depend on similar feature combinations–a phenomenon we call featurelocality– that this locality can be combined with historical data to predict failure-prone configurations and reconfiguration workarounds, and that these workarounds rarely lead the system out of one failure and into another. In a case study on 128 failures reported against released versions of an open source configurable system, and 16 failures discovered through a state-of-the-art testing tool, plus several thousand tests cases, we find evidence to support all of these hypotheses.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588-0115, USA

    Brady J. Garvin, Myra B. Cohen & Matthew B. Dwyer

Authors
  1. Brady J. Garvin
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  2. Myra B. Cohen
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  3. Matthew B. Dwyer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, 3030-290, Coimbra, Portugal

    Javier Cámara

  2. School of Computing, University of Kent, CT2 7NF, Canterbury, Kent, UK

    Rogério de Lemos

  3. Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Via Golgi, 42, 20133, Milano, Italy

    Carlo Ghezzi

  4. Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Campo Grande, 1749-016, Portugal

    Antónia Lopes

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Garvin, B.J., Cohen, M.B., Dwyer, M.B. (2013). Failure Avoidance in Configurable Systems through Feature Locality. In: Cámara, J., de Lemos, R., Ghezzi, C., Lopes, A. (eds) Assurances for Self-Adaptive Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7740. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36249-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36249-1_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36248-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36249-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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