Concepts and implications of undo for interactive recovery

Gordon, Robert F.; Leeman, George B.; Lewis, Clayton

doi:10.1145/320435.320483

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…A subsequent application of undo will "undo the undo" and restore the original command. The undo operation is thus said to be self-applicable [44]. There is no explicit redo operation in a primitive-command undo model.…”

Section: Undo Models For Productivity Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the familiar command/history paradigm, this point on the axis typically manifests as an undo command that can only undo the immediately-prior operation, with no opportunity for redo. In Gordon's formalization of command-based undo, this corresponds to an undo operator with neither the invertibility nor self-applicability properties [44].…”

Section: Design Axes For Undo Models Within a Sphere Of Undomentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Recovery-Oriented Approach to Dependable Services: Repairing Past Errors with System-Wide Undo

Brown¹,

Patterson²

2003

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Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to a penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number. Motivated by the pressing need for increased dependability in corporate and Internet services and by the perspective that effective recovery can improve dependability as much or more than avoiding failures, we introduce a novel recovery mechanism that gives human system operators the power of system-wide undo. System-wide undo allows operators to roll back erroneous changes to a service?s state without losing end-user data or updates, to make retroactive repairs in the historical timeline of the service system, and thereby to quickly recover from catastrophic state corruption, operator error failed upgrades, and external attacks, even when the root cause of the catastrophe is unknown. We explore system-wide undo via a framework based on the novel concept of spheres of undo bubbles of state and time that provide scope to the state recoverable by undo and serve as a structuring tool for implementing undo on standalone services, hierarchically-composed systems, and distributed interacting services. Crucially, spheres of undo allow us to define the concept of paradoxes, inconsistencies that occur when an undo process retroactively alters state that has been exposed outside of its containing sphere of undo. Managing paradoxes is the grand challenge of system-wide undo, and to tackle it we introduce a framework that automatically detects and compensates for paradoxes; our approach exploits the relaxed consistency semantics already present in existing services that interact with human end-users. We describe an implementation of our system-wide undo framework for standalone services with human end-users. We explore its applicability by assembling and evaluating a prototype undoable email store service, by analyzing what would be necessary to construct an undoable online auction service and by developing a set of guidelines to help service designers retrofit their services with undo. We find that system-wide undo functionality imposes non-negligible but tolerable overhead in terms of both time and space. Using a novel methodology we develop to benchmark human-assisted recovery processes, we also find that undo-based recovery has a net positive effect on dependability, providing significant improvements in correctn...

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Section: Undo Models For Productivity Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Design Axes For Undo Models Within a Sphere Of Undomentioning

confidence: 99%

A Recovery-Oriented Approach to Dependable Services: Repairing Past Errors with System-Wide Undo

Brown¹,

Patterson²

2003

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“…This advantage has been resolved into the sequential redoing function of the proposed conceptual model. Also all the desired characteristics of undo proposed by Gordon et al [3] have been resolved into this model.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Conceptual Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…ENVIRONMENT OF A USER RECOVERY AND COMMAND REUSE FACILITY Archer et al [l] describe a general user recovery and command reuse facility using a script model. Gordon et al [3] describe different properties of undoing and explore tensions among them. Both analyse useful characteristics of undoing but each adopts too restrictive an approach to a user recovery facility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A new conceptual model for interactive user recovery and command reuse facilities

Yang

1988

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '88

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This paper generalises approaches to modelling an undo facility for interactive systems into a comprehensive user recovery and command reuse facility. It separates different undoing actions into distinct undoing functions and incorporates redoing capability in a more general command reuse capacity. Four adequacy criteria for such a facility are proposed and a general model is developed to meet these requirements. Partial, patterned and repetitive undoing and redoing actions are allowed on simple, complex and meta commands. The model subsumes the functionality of prior models.

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“…As our major contribution, we present a formal engineering method how to systematically transform the component's state-based implementation when the input interface is enriched by undo commands under different cancellation policies [9] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enriching the Input Interface of Interactive Components with Undo Commands

Dosch

2006

Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA'06)

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The paper studies the systematic design and implementation of interactive components whose input interface is enriched by undo commands. An undo command inverts the interaction history returning to a previously visited state. We formalize different policies for undo commands cancelling the most recent input, the most recent occurrence of a specified input, and the final history segment after a user defined checkpoint. For each undo policy, we specify the component's modified input/output behaviour in terms of the original behaviour as a function from input streams to output streams. Then we systematically transform the modified input/output behaviour into an implementation by a state transition machine. The resulting formal method extends the state transition table of an interactive component in a systematic way when its input interface is enriched by undo commands under different policies.

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Concepts and implications of undo for interactive recovery

Cited by 9 publications

References 8 publications

A Recovery-Oriented Approach to Dependable Services: Repairing Past Errors with System-Wide Undo

A Recovery-Oriented Approach to Dependable Services: Repairing Past Errors with System-Wide Undo

A new conceptual model for interactive user recovery and command reuse facilities

Enriching the Input Interface of Interactive Components with Undo Commands

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