A Case Study of Dynamic Analysis to Locate Unexpected Side Effects Inside of Frameworks

Abstract

Recently many frameworks are deployed without proper documents to explain their correct usage. In the absence of proper documents, application developers often write code to call a framework API in a wrong way. Such a wrong API call tends to bring about a failure after its complex chain of infection inside of a framework. The complexity and the lack of implementation knowledge about a framework make it difficult for application developers to debug this kind of failure. In the preceding study the authors focused on unexpected side effects that are caused by wrong API calls and bring about failures, and developed a dynamic analysis technique to detect such side effects. In this paper, the authors introduce a case study to find a wrong API call using our technique.