Failure Avoidance in Configurable Systems through Feature Locality

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

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-36249-1_10

Cited by 15 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Alternatively, we know that the persistent memory contains a large portion of the correct configuration space, so algorithms that work from this point and search close by may be useful for reproducibility. Research has shown that failures tend to have feature locality [11], so it is possible we can leverage some of those ideas for this work.…”

Section: Configuration Traceability Is a Necessitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

Jin

Qu²,

Cohen

et al. 2014

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Many industrial systems are highly-configurable, complicating the testing and debugging process. While researchers have developed techniques to statically extract, quantify and manipulate the valid system configurations, we conjecture that many of these techniques will fail in practice. In this paper we analyze a highly-configurable industrial application and two open source applications in order to quantify the true challenges that configurability creates for software testing and debugging. We find that (1) all three applications consist of multiple programming languages, hence static analyses need to cross programming language barriers to work, (2) there are many access points and methods to modify configurations, implying that practitioners need configuration traceability and should gather and merge metadata from more than one source and (3) the configuration state of an application on failure cannot be reliably determined by reading persistent data; a runtime memory dump or other heuristics must be used for accurate debugging. We conclude with a roadmap and lessons learned to help practitioners better handle configurability now, and that may lead to new configuration-aware testing and debugging techniques in the future.

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Section: Configuration Traceability Is a Necessitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There has also been recent work that uses configurability as a way to avoid failures through self-adaptation [11]. But all of this work assumes that the configuration model is known (or is somehow extracted).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

Jin

Qu²,

Cohen

et al. 2014

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

Self Cite

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“…If a failure is encountered at runtime, we want to move to another configuration to avoid this problem. Garvin et al [21,23] proposed a brute force n-hop algorithm, that tries each possible configuration n-hops away from the starting one. For instance, a 1-hop variant of this algorithm would first include keyword.enabled, leaving all other features as-is.…”

Section: Finding Workaroundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The work of [42], uses self-adaptation in software product lines, a type of configurable software system. The most closely related work on configuration-aware adaptation, is our own [21,23], but we did not implement our techniques on a running system.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Swanson

Cohen

Dwyer

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

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Self-adaptive software systems monitor their state and then adapt when certain conditions are met, guided by a global utility function. In prior work we developed algorithms and conducted a post-hoc analysis demonstrating the possibility of adapting to software failures by judiciously changing configurations. In this paper we present the REFRACT framework that realizes this idea in practice by building on the self-adaptive Rainbow architecture. REFRACT extends Rainbow with new components and algorithms targeting failure avoidance. We use REFRACT in a case study running four independently executing Firefox clients with 36 passing test cases and 7 seeded faults. The study show that workarounds for all but one of the seeded faults are found and the one that is not found never fails -it is guarded from failing by a related workaround. Moreover, REFRACT finds workarounds for eight configuration-related unseeded failures from tests that were expected to pass (and did under the default configuration). Finally, the data show that when a failure and its workaround are found, configuration guards prevent the failure from appearing again. In a simulation lasting 24 hours we see over 150 guard activations and no failures with workarounds remaining beyond 16 hours.

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A survey of self‐healing systems frameworks

2014

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SUMMARYRising complexity within muti-tier computing architectures remains an open problem. As complexity increases so do the costs associated with operating and maintaining systems within these environments. One approach for addressing these problems is to build self-healing systems (i.e., frameworks) that can autonomously detect and recover from faulty states. Self-healing systems often combine machine learning techniques with closed control loops to reduce the number of situations requiring human intervention. This is particularly useful in situations where human involvement is both costly to develop, and a source of potential faults. Therefore, a survey of self-healing frameworks and methodologies in multi-tier architectures is provided to the reader. Uniquely, this study combines an overview of the state of the art with a comparative analysis of the computing environment, degree of behavioural autonomy, and organisational requirements of these approaches. Highlighting these aspects provides for an understanding of the different situational benefits of these self-healing systems. We conclude with a discussion of potential and current research directions within this field.

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Failure Avoidance in Configurable Systems through Feature Locality

Cited by 15 publications

References 32 publications

Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

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

A survey of self‐healing systems frameworks

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