Title
Inferring class level specifications for distributed systems
Abstract
Distributed systems often contain many behaviorally similar processes, which are conveniently grouped into classes. In system modeling, it is common to specify such systems by describing the class level behavior, instead of object level behavior. While there have been techniques that mine specifications of such distributed systems from their execution traces, these methods only mine object-level specifications involving concrete process objects. This leads to specifications which are large, hard to comprehend, and sensitive to simple changes in the system (such as the number of objects). In this paper, we develop a class level specification mining framework for distributed systems. A specification that describes interaction snippets between various processes in a distributed system forms a natural and intuitive way to document their behavior. Our mining method groups together such interactions between behaviorally similar processes, and presents a mined specification involving “symbolic” Message Sequence Charts. Our experiments indicate that our mined symbolic specifications are significantly smaller than mined concrete specifications, while at the same time achieving better precision and recall.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227128
Software Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
distributed processing,formal specification,class level behavior,distributed systems,execution traces,inferring class level specifications,interaction snippets,message sequence charts,object level behavior,object level specifications,specification mining
Conference
2
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0270-5257 E-ISBN : 978-1-4673-1065-9
978-1-4673-1065-9
14
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.59
23
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sandeep Kumar11529.90
Siau-Cheng Khoo2232.09
Abhik Roychoudhury32449122.18
David Lo45346259.67