SMScom: Self-Managing Situated Computing

Modern software systems are composed of several services which may be developed and maintained by third parties and thus they can change independently and without notice during the system’s runtime execution. In such systems, changes may possibly be a threat to system functional correctness, and thus to its reliability. Hence, it is important to detect them as soon as they happen to enable proper reaction. Change detection can be done by monitoring system execution and comparing the observed execution traces against models of the services composing the application. Unfortunately, formal specifications for services are not usually provided and developers have to infer them. In this paper we propose a methodology which exactly addresses these issues by using software behavior models to monitor component execution and detect changes. In particular, we describe a technique to infer behavior model specifications with a dynamic black box approach, keep them up-to-date with run time observations and detect behavior changes. Finally, we present a case study to validate the effectiveness of the approach in component change detection for a component that implements a complex, real communication protocol.

Contracts are a popular declarative specification technique to describe the behavior of stateful components in terms of pre/post conditions and invariants. Since each operation is specified separately in terms of an abstract implementation, it may be hard to understand and validate the resulting component behavior from contracts in terms of method interactions. In particular, properties expressed through algebraic axioms, which specify the effect of sequences of operations, require complex theorem proving techniques to be validated. In this paper, we propose an automatic small-scope based approach to synthesize incomplete behavioral abstractions for contracts expressed in the JFSL notation. The proposed abstraction technique enables the possibility to check that the contract behavior is coherent with behavioral properties expressed as axioms of an algebraic specifications. We assess the applicability of our approach by showing how the synthesis methodology can be applied to some classes of contract-based artifacts like specifications of data abstractions and requirement engineering models.

We present Spy@Runtime, a tool to infer and work with behavior models. Spy@Runtime generates models through a dynamic black box approach and is able to keep them updated with observations coming from actual system execution. We also show how to use models describing the protocol of interaction of a software component to detect and report functional changes as soon as they are discovered. Monitoring functional properties is particularly useful in an open environment in which there is a distributed ownership of a software system. Parts of the system may be changed independently and therefore it becomes necessary to monitor the component's behavior at run time.

Symbolic program manipulation plays a key role in program comprehension and verification. Logic formulae are used to represent the program' s state and transformation rules describe the effect of statement executions on the program's state. A well-known problem arises in the case of loops, since the number of iterations is generally unknown. The effect of a loop is therefore abstracted into a loop invariant, whose derivation cannot in general be automated and requires human ingenuity. In this paper, we present a preliminary approach that in tegrates genetic programming into the synthesis of invariant formula that describes the behavior of a loop. We present a specific representation of formulae that works well with loops manipulating arrays. The technique has been validated with a set of relevant examples with increasing complexity. The preliminary results are promising and show the feasibility of our approach.

We focus on the problem of searching components based on semantic queries on their provided interface. Although semantics-based search has long been advocated as a key enabler in the context of component-based software development and, more recently, service-oriented computing, no practical and scalable approach has been proposed yet. This paper presents a promising model-based search technique for interface behaviors based on operational specifications, called behavioral equivalence models (Bems). Semantic queries are expressed equationally, following an algebraic specification style. The search engine tries to match specifications against queries. This can be done quite efficiently by encoding Bems into relational models and queries into relational logic formulae, whose satisfiability is checked with the SAT-based constraint solver KodKod. We can report on an initial very promising assessment of the proposed technique, which has been applied to searching components in Java libraries providing container functionalities.

The problem of formal software specification has been addressed and discussed since the infancy of software engineering. However, among all the proposed solutions, none is universally accepted yet. Many different formal descriptions can in fact be given for the same software component; thus, the problem of determining the consistency relation among those descriptions becomes relevant and potentially critical. In this work, we propose a method for comparing two specific kinds of formal specifications of containers. In particular, we check the consistency of intensional behavior models with algebraic specifications. The consistency check is performed by generating a behavioral equivalence model from the intensional model, converting the algebraic axioms into temporal logic formulae, and then checking them against the model by using the NuSMV model checker. An automated software tool which encodes the problem as model checking has been implemented to check the consistency of recovered specifications of relevant Java classes.

This paper describes an approach (SPY) to recover the specification of a software component from the observation of its run-time behavior. It focuses on components that behave as data abstractions. Components are assumed to be black boxes that do not allow any implementation inspection. The inferred description may help understand what the component does when no formal specification is available. SPY works in two main stages. First, it builds a deterministic finite-state machine that models the partial behavior of instances of the data abstraction. This is then generalized via graph transformation rules. The rules can generate a possibly infinite number of behavior models, which generalize the description of the data abstraction under an assumption of “regularity” with respect to the observed behavior. The rules can be viewed as a likely specification of the data abstraction. We illustrate how SPY works on relevant examples and we compare it with competing methods.