Automatic workarounds for web applications

Abstract

We present a technique that finds and executes workarounds for faulty Web applications automatically and at runtime. Automatic workarounds exploit the inherent redundancy of Web applications, whereby a functionality of the application can be obtained through different sequences of invocations of Web APIs. In general, runtime workarounds are applied in response to a failure, and require that the application remain in a consistent state before and after the execution of a workaround. Therefore, they are ideally suited for interactive Web applications, since those allow the user to act as a failure detector with minimal effort, and also either use read-only state or manage their state through a transactional data store. In this paper we focus on faults found in the access libraries of widely used Web applications such as Google Maps. We start by classifying a number of reported faults of the Google Maps and YouTube APIs that have known workarounds. From those we derive a number of general and API-specific program-rewriting rules, which we then apply to other faults for which no workaround is known. Our experiments show that workarounds can be readily deployed within Web applications, through a simple client-side plug-in, and that program-rewriting rules derived from elementary properties of a common library can be effective in finding valid and previously unknown workarounds.

Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Second Research Roadmap

“…To illustrate the specifics of SE processes for self-adaptive software systems and their differences to traditional software development and evolution activities, we compare the traditional approach to corrective maintenance [50] with the automatic workarounds approach [13,14]. Automatic workarounds aim to mask functional faults at run-time by automatically looking for and executing alternative ways to perform actions that lead to failures.…”

Towards self-healing smartphone software via automated patching

“…Carzaniga et al [4] employ code rewriting to work around API-related faults in web applications. They have showed their approach in popular web APIs such as Google maps and YouTube.…”

Beyond the rainbow: self-adaptive failure avoidance in configurable systems

“…There is a large body of research on both self-adaptive systems [3,4,8,9,12,14,16,20,24,40], and on testing highlyconfigurable software [27,29,37,38,45]. Self-adaptive software came out of research on autonomic computing [18].…”

“…Weimer et al [44] finds faults in systems using test cases, and then uses an extended form of genetic programming to fix the code. Carzaniga et al [2][3][4], find workarounds which are code-level alternate library calls. This technique is similar to ours in its goal and the requirements to find a workaround.…”