Title
Detecting inconsistencies in wrappers: a case study
Abstract
Exchangeability between software components such as operating systems, middleware, databases, and hardware components is a common requirement in many software systems. One way to enable exchangeability is to promote indirect use through a common interface and an implementation for each component that wraps the original component. As developers use the interface instead of the underlying component, they assume that the software system will behave in a specific way independently of the actual component in use. However, differences in the implementations of the wrappers may lead to different behavior when one component is changed for another, which might lead to failures in the field. This work reports on a simple, yet effective approach to detect these differences. The approach is based on tool-supported reviews leveraging lightweight static analysis and machine learning. The approach is evaluated in a case study that analyzes NASAs Operating System Abstraction Layer (OSAL), which is used in various space missions. We detected 84 corner-case issues of which 57 turned out to be bugs that could have resulted in runtime failures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606652
Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
common requirement,software component,software system,hardware component,effective approach,common interface,actual component,underlying component,original component,detecting inconsistency,case study,indirect use,computer bugs,operating system,database,learning artificial intelligence,object oriented programming,abstraction,equivalence,feature extraction,machine learning,data mining,interfaces,software systems,measurement,middleware
Middleware,Object-oriented programming,Software engineering,Computer science,Static analysis,Real-time computing,Implementation,Software system,Space exploration,Component-based software engineering,Operating system abstraction layer
Conference
Volume
ISBN
Citations 
2
978-1-4673-3076-3
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
18
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Henning Femmer115816.72
Dharmalingam Ganesan216413.87
Mikael Lindvall3120395.86
David McComas4332.53