Predicting problems caused by component upgrades

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“Predicting problems caused by component upgrades” by Stephen McCamant and Michael D. Ernst. In ESEC/FSE 2003: Proceedings of the 9th European Software Engineering Conference and the 11th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, (Helsinki, Finland), Sep. 2003, pp. 287-296.
An extended version appeared as MIT Laboratory for Computer Science technical report 941, (Cambridge, MA), Mar. 2004. Revision of first author's Master's thesis.
An extended version appeared as “Predicting problems caused by component upgrades” by Stephen McCamant. Masters thesis, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, (Cambridge, MA), January 15, 2004.

Abstract

We present a new, automatic technique to assess whether replacing a component of a software system by a purportedly compatible component may change the behavior of the system. The technique operates before integrating the new component into the system or running system tests, permitting quicker and cheaper identification of problems. It takes into account the system's use of the component, because a particular component upgrade may be desirable in one context but undesirable in another. No formal specifications are required, permitting detection of problems due either to errors in the component or to errors in the system. Both external and internal behaviors can be compared, enabling detection of problems that are not immediately reflected in the output.

The technique generates an operational abstraction for the old component in the context of the system and generates an operational abstraction for the new component in the context of its test suite; an operational abstraction is a set of program properties that generalizes over observed run-time behavior. If automated logical comparison indicates that the new component does not make all the guarantees that the old one did, then the upgrade may affect system behavior and should not be performed without further scrutiny. In case studies, the technique identified several incompatibilities among software components.

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BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{McCamantE2003,
   author = {Stephen McCamant and Michael D. Ernst},
   title = {Predicting problems caused by component upgrades},
   booktitle = {ESEC/FSE 2003: Proceedings of the 9th European Software
	Engineering Conference and the 11th {ACM} {SIGSOFT} Symposium on
	the Foundations of Software Engineering},
   pages = {287--296},
   address = {Helsinki, Finland},
   month = sep,
   year = {2003}
}

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