Safe component updates

Abstract

Component updates always imply the risk of negatively influencing the operability of software systems. Because of wrong combinations of component versions, dependencies might break, methods which do no longer exist, might be called or methods might not be compatible to provided interfaces, objects, or classes. In this paper we model the problem of finding a well-configured system consisting of multiple component versions as a Boolean Optimization Problem. We introduce objective functions and constraints, which use Branch-and-Bound for restricting the search space and yield most recent, minimal systems.

Component meets service: what does the mongrel look like?

“…Although problems of software configuration management have been around for more than 30 years, effective solutions for controlling the evolutionary processes in component development are still rare [31]. Assuming a component model with strongly typed interface elements and a distinction between derived and provided interfaces, Stuckenholz and Osterloh [32] introduce a graph-based dependency model and proposes a solution by synthesizing consistent configurations through Boolean optimization.…”