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In-field healing of integration problems with COTS components

Additional information

Authors
Chang H., Mariani L., Pezzè M.
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2009
Language
English
Abstract
Developers frequently integrate complex COTS frameworks and components in software applications. COTS products are often only partially documented, and developers may misuse technologies and introduce integration faults, as witnessed by the many entries in fault repositories. Once identified, common integration problems and their fixes are usually documented in forums and fault repositories on the Web, but this does not prevent them to occur in the field when COTS products are reused. In this paper, we propose a methodology and a self- healing technology that can reduce the occurrence of infield failures caused by common integration problems that are identified and documented by COTS developers. Our methodology supports COTS developers in producing healing connectors for common misuses of COTS products. Our technology produces information that facilitate debugging and patching of applications that use COTS products. Application developers inject healing connectors into their systems to automatically repair problems caused by misuses of COTS products. Healing takes place at run-time, on-the-fly and in-the-field. The activity of healing connectors is traced in log files, to facilitate debugging and patching of integration problems. Empirical experiences with several applications and COTS products show the feasibility of the approach and the efficiency of the technology.
Conference proceedings
Software Engineering, 2009. ICSE 2009. IEEE 31st International Conference on
Start page number
166
End page number
176
ISBN
978-1-4244-3453-4
Keywords
application debugging, application patching, Application software, Connectors, Costs, COTS product, COTS software component, Debugging, in-field integration problem healing, infield failure, Informatics, integration fault repository, Java, object-oriented programming, program debugging, Runtime, software fault tolerance, software packages, Software testing, Springs, system recovery, Web server