In this paper I discuss how can lightweight formal methods be used to specify and verify software with complex configurations (for example, distributed protocols that work on specific network configurations). More specifically, I briefly present two popular formal methods - TLA+ and Alloy - and discuss the pros and cons of both in this particular context.
Machine-learning (ML) techniques have become popular in the recent years. ML techniques rely on mathematics and on software engineering. Researchers and practitioners studying best practices for designing ML application systems and software to address the software complexity and quality of ML techniques. Such design practices are often formalized as architecture patterns and design patterns by encapsulating reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems within given contexts. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no work collecting, classifying, and discussing these software…
Internet of Things (IoT) applications typically collect and analyse personal data that can be used to derive sensitive information about individuals. However, thus far, privacy concerns have not been explicitly considered in software engineering processes when designing IoT applications. The advent of behaviour driven security mechanisms, failing to address privacy concerns in the design of IoT applications can have security implications. In this paper, we explore how a Privacy-by-Design (PbD) framework, formulated as a set of guidelines, can help software engineers integrate data privacy cons…
Software architecture students, often, lack self-confidence in their ability to use their knowledge to design software architectures. This paper investigates the relations between undergraduate software architecture students' self-confidence and their course expectations, cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. We developed a questionnaire with open-ended questions to assess the self-confidence levels and related factors, which was taken by one-hundred ten students in two semesters. The students answers were coded and analyzed afterward. We found that self-confiden…
Software architectures are critical in the successful development and evolution of software-intensive systems. While formal and automated support for architectural descriptions has been widely addressed, their evolution is equally crucial, but significantly less well-understood and supported. In order to face a recurring evolution need, we introduce the concept of evolution pattern. It formalises an architectural evolution through both a set of concepts and a reusable evolution process. We propose it through the recurring need of introducing an architectural style on existing software architec…
Randomized field experiments are the gold standard for evaluating the impact of software changes on customers. In the online domain, randomization has been the main tool to ensure exchangeability. However, due to the different deployment conditions and the high dependence on the surrounding environment, designing experiments for automotive software needs to consider a higher number of restricted variables to ensure conditional exchangeability. In this paper, we show how at Volvo Cars we utilize causal graphical models to design experiments and explicitly communicate the assumptions of experime…
Report on the Designing Accountable Software Systems Workshop
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；ICSI（国际计算机科学研究所）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
Overcoming society's complex problems requires novel solutions. Applying different cognitive styles can promote novelty when designing software aimed at these problems. Through an experiment with 80 software design practitioners, we found that female practitioners who had a preference for more than one cognitive style (intuition and rationality) produced the most novel software features of all participants.
Feature toggles and configuration options are modern programmatic techniques to easily include or exclude functionality in a software product. The research contributions to these two techniques have most often been focused on either one of them separately. However, focusing on the similarities of these two techniques may enable a more fruitful combined family of research on software configuration, a term we use to encompass both techniques. Also, a common terminology may have enabled meta-analysis, a more practical application of the research on the two techniques, and prevented duplication of…
This paper introduces the idea of mining container image repositories for configuration and other deployment information of software systems. Unlike traditional software repositories (e.g., source code repositories and app stores), image repositories encapsulate the entire execution ecosystem for running target software, including its configurations, dependent libraries and components, and OS-level utilities, which contributes to a wealth of data and information. We showcase the opportunities based on concrete software engineering tasks that can benefit from mining image repositories. To facil…
We suggest there is a need for a fresh perspective on the design and development of workflow systems and argue for a building blocks approach. We outline a description of this approach and define the properties of software building blocks. We discuss RADICAL-Cybertools as one implementation of the building blocks concept, showing how they have been designed and developed in accordance with this approach. Four case studies are presented, covering a dozen science problems. We discuss how RADICAL-Cybertools have been used to develop new workflow systems capabilities and integrated to enhance exis…
The article proposes a model for the configuration management of open systems. The model aims at validation of configurations against given specifications. An extension of decision graphs is proposed to express specifications. The proposed model can be used by software developers to validate their own configurations across different versions of the components, or to validate configurations that include components by third parties. The model can also be used by end-users to validate compatibility among different configurations of the same application. The proposed model is first discussed in so…
The Software Design Document of UUIS describes the prototype design details of the system architecture, database layer, deployment and configuration details as well as test cases produced while working the design and implementation of the prototype. The requirements specification of UUIS are detailed in arXiv:1005.0783.
Misconfigurations have become the dominant causes of software failures in recent years, drawing tremendous attention for their increasing prevalence and severity. Configuration constraints can preemptively avoid misconfiguration by defining the conditions that configuration options should satisfy. Documentation is the main source of configuration constraints, but it might be incomplete or inconsistent with the source code. In this regard, prior researches have focused on obtaining configuration constraints from software source code through static analysis. However, the difficulty in pointer an…
This paper proposes configuration testing--evaluating configuration values (to be deployed) by exercising the code that uses the values and assessing the corresponding program behavior. We advocate that configuration values should be systematically tested like software code and that configuration testing should be a key reliability engineering practice for preventing misconfigurations from production deployment. The essential advantage of configuration testing is to put the configuration values (to be deployed) in the context of the target software program under test. In this way, the dynamic …
Widely used software systems such as video encoders are by necessity highly configurable, with hundreds or even thousands of options to choose from. Their users often have a hard time finding suitable values for these options (i.e. finding a proper configuration of the software system) to meet their goals for the tasks at hand, e.g. compress a video down to a certain size. One dimension of the problem is of course that performance depends on the input data: a video as input to an encoder like x264 or a file system fed to a tool like xz. To achieve good performance, users should therefore take …
The ever-increasing complexity of software systems makes them hard to comprehend, predict and tune due to emergent properties and non-deterministic behaviour. Complexity arises from the size of software systems and the wide variety of possible operating environments: the increasing choice of platforms and communication policies leads to ever more complex performance characteristics. In addition, software systems exhibit different behaviour under different workloads. Many software systems are designed to be configurable so that policies can be chosen to meet the needs of various stakeholders. F…
This paper shows how maximum possible configuration efficiency of an indefinitely large software system is constrained by chosing a fixed upper limit to the number of program units per subsystem. It is then shown how the configuration efficiency of an indefinitely large software system depends on the ratio of the total number of informaiton hiding violational software units divided by the total number of program units.
Performance is an important non-functional aspect of the software requirement. Modern software systems are highly-configurable and misconfigurations may easily cause performance issues. A software system that suffers performance issues may exhibit low program throughput and long response time. However, the sheer size of the configuration space makes it challenging for administrators to manually select and adjust the configuration options to achieve better performance. In this paper, we propose ConfRL, an approach to tune software performance automatically. The key idea of ConfRL is to use rein…
Context: Software has become an innovative solution nowadays for many applications and methods in science and engineering. Ensuring the quality and correctness of software is challenging because each program has different configurations and input domains. To ensure the quality of software, all possible configurations and input combinations need to be evaluated against their expected outputs. However, this exhaustive test is impractical because of time and resource constraints due to the large domain of input and configurations. Thus, different sampling techniques have been used to sample these…
Accountability is an often called for property of technical systems. It is a requirement for algorithmic decision systems, autonomous cyber-physical systems, and for software systems in general. As a concept, accountability goes back to the early history of Liberalism and is suggested as a tool to limit the use of power. This long history has also given us many, often slightly differing, definitions of accountability. The problem that software developers now face is to understand what accountability means for their systems and how to reflect it in a system's design. To enable the rigorous stud…
Configuration tuning for large software systems is generally challenging due to the complex configuration space and expensive performance evaluation. Most existing approaches follow a two-phase process, first learning a regression-based performance prediction model on available samples and then searching for the configurations with satisfactory performance using the learned model. Such regression-based models often suffer from the scarcity of samples due to the enormous time and resources required to run a large software system with a specific configuration. Moreover, previous studies have sho…
Software engineers frequently face the challenge of developing systems whose requirements are likely to change in order to adapt to organizational reconfigurations or other external pressures. Evolving requirements present difficulties, especially in environments in which business agility demands shorter development times and responsive prototyping. This paper uses a study from CERN in Geneva to address these research questions by employing a description-driven approach that is responsive to changes in user requirements and that facilitates dynamic system reconfiguration. The study describes h…
Modern software systems are increasingly designed to be highly configurable, which increases flexibility but can make programs harder to develop, test, and analyze, e.g., how configuration options are set to reach certain locations, what characterizes the configuration space of an interesting or buggy program behavior? We introduce GenTree, a new dynamic analysis that automatically learns a program's interactions - logical formulae that describe how configuration option settings map to code coverage. GenTree uses an iterative refinement approach that runs the program under a small sample of co…
This document provides a description of the technical design for Unified University Inventory System - Web Portal. This document's primary purpose is to describe the technical vision for how business requirements will be realized. This document provides an architectural overview of the system to depict different aspects of the system. This document also functions as a foundational reference point for developers.
This paper introduces CONFIGEN, a tool that helps modularizing software. CONFIGEN allows the developer to select a set of elementary components for his software through an interactive interface. Configuration files for use by C/assembly code and Makefiles are then automatically generated, and we successfully used it as a helper tool for complex system software refactoring. CONFIGEN is based on propositional logic, and its implementation faces hard theoretical problems.
Design patterns are well practices to share software development experiences. These patterns allow enhancing reusability, readability and maintainability of architecture and code of software applications. As simulation applies computerized models to produce traces in order to obtain results and conclusions, designers of simulation explored design patterns to make the simulation code more reusable, more readable and easy to maintain, in addition to design complex software oriented simulation modeling. In DEVS (Discrete Event System specification), the designers have successfully designed simula…
The document presents a detailed description of the designs for the implementation of the Unified University Inventory System for the Imaginary University of Arctica. The document, through numerous diagrams and UI samples, gives the structure of the system and the functions of its modules. It also gives test cases and reports that support the system's architecture and design.
Finding good configurations for a software system is often challenging since the number of configuration options can be large. Software engineers often make poor choices about configuration or, even worse, they usually use a sub-optimal configuration in production, which leads to inadequate performance. To assist engineers in finding the (near) optimal configuration, this paper introduces FLASH, a sequential model-based method, which sequentially explores the configuration space by reflecting on the configurations evaluated so far to determine the next best configuration to explore. FLASH scal…
As software systems grow in complexity, the space of possible configurations grows exponentially. Within this increasing complexity, developers, maintainers, and users cannot keep track of the interactions between all the various configuration options. Finding the optimally performing configuration of a software system for a given setting is challenging. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning performance models based on a sample set of configurations. However, collecting enough data on enough sample configurations can be very expensive since each such sample requires configuring,…
Application developers often place executable assertions -- equipped with program-specific predicates -- in their system, targeting programming errors. However, these detectors can detect data errors resulting from transient hardware faults in main memory as well. But while an assertion reduces silent data corruptions (SDCs) in the program state they check, they add runtime to the target program that increases the attack surface for the remaining state. This article outlines an approach to find an optimal subset of assertions that minimizes the SDC count, without the need to run fault-injectio…
The purpose of this document is to provide technical specifications concerned to the Design of the University Unified Inventory System - Web Portal, of the UIfA. The Team of Developers used a Feedback Waterfall approach to build up the system, under an Object Oriented paradigm. The architectural model followed was the Model-View-Controller, mixed with a Mapper layer between the database and the Model. Some of the patterns utilized in the developing of the System were the Observer Pattern, the Command Pattern, and the Mapper Pattern.
The promise of increased agility, autonomy, scalability, and reusability has made the microservices architecture a \textit{de facto} standard for the development of large-scale and cloud-native commercial applications. Software patterns are an important design tool, and often they are selected and combined with the goal of obtaining a set of desired quality attributes. However, from a research standpoint, many patterns have not been widely validated against industry practice, making them not much more than interesting theories. To address this, we investigated how practitioners perceive the im…
Industrial practitioners now face a bewildering array of possible configurations for effort estimation. How to select the best one for a particular dataset? This paper introduces OIL (short for optimized learning), a novel configuration tool for effort estimation based on differential evolution. When tested on 945 software projects, OIL significantly improved effort estimations, after exploring just a few configurations (just a few dozen). Further OIL's results are far better than two methods in widespread use: estimation-via-analogy and a recent state-of-the-art baseline published at TOSEM'15…
In this paper, the basic ideal of the Event Space Theory and Analyzing Events are expatiated on. Then it is suggested that how to set up event base library in developing application software. Based above the designing principle of facing methodology. Finally, in order to explain how to apply the Event Space Theory in developing economic evaluation software, the software of "sewage treatment CAD" in a national "8th-Five Year Plan Research Project" of PRC is used as an example. This software concerns economic effectiveness evaluation for construction projects.
The design and development process for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is more complicated than for desktop, mobile, or web applications. IoT applications require both software and hardware to work together across multiple different types of nodes (e.g., microcontrollers, system-on-chips, mobile phones, miniaturised single-board computers, and cloud platforms) with different capabilities under different conditions. IoT applications typically collect and analyse personal data that can be used to derive sensitive information about individuals. Without proper privacy protections in place, I…
Modern cloud services have complex architectures, often comprising many software components, and depend on hundreds of configurations parameters to function correctly, securely, and with high performance. Due to the prevalence of open-source software, developers can easily deploy services using third-party software without mastering the configurations of that software. As a result, configuration errors (i.e., misconfigurations) are among the leading causes of service disruptions and outages. While existing cloud automation tools ease the process of service deployment and management, support fo…
Empirical software engineering has received much attention in recent years and coined the shift from a more design-science-driven engineering discipline to an insight-oriented, and theory-centric one. Yet, we still face many challenges, among which some increase the need for interdisciplinary research. This is especially true for the investigation of human-centric aspects of software engineering. Although we can already observe an increased recognition of the need for more interdisciplinary research in (empirical) software engineering, such research configurations come with challenges barely d…
Accurately predicting faulty software units helps practitioners target faulty units and prioritize their efforts to maintain software quality. Prior studies use machine-learning models to detect faulty software code. We revisit past studies and point out potential improvements. Our new study proposes a revised benchmarking configuration. The configuration considers many new dimensions, such as class distribution sampling, evaluation metrics, and testing procedures. The new study also includes new datasets and models. Our findings suggest that predictive accuracy is generally good. However, pre…
