A Historical Perspective on Runtime Assertion Checking in Software Development

This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information

Automatic Test Generation for Space

The European Space Agency (ESA) uses an engine to perform tests in the Ground Segment infrastructure, specially the Operational Simulator. This engine uses many different tools to ensure the development of regression testing infrastructure and these tests perform black-box testing to the C++ simulator implementation. VST (VisionSpace Technologies) is one of the companies that provides these services to ESA and they need a tool to infer automatically tests from the existing C++ code, instead of writing manually scripts to perform tests. With this motivation in mind, this paper explores automatic testing approaches and tools in order to propose a system that satisfies VST needs

mRUBiS: An Exemplar for Model-Based Architectural Self-Healing and Self-Optimization

Self-adaptive software systems are often structured into an adaptation engine that manages an adaptable software by operating on a runtime model that represents the architecture of the software (model-based architectural self-adaptation). Despite the popularity of such approaches, existing exemplars provide application programming interfaces but no runtime model to develop adaptation engines. Consequently, there does not exist any exemplar that supports developing, evaluating, and comparing model-based self-adaptation off the shelf. Therefore, we present mRUBiS, an extensible exemplar for model-based architectural self-healing and self-optimization. mRUBiS simulates the adaptable software and therefore provides and maintains an architectural runtime model of the software, which can be directly used by adaptation engines to realize and perform self-adaptation. Particularly, mRUBiS supports injecting issues into the model, which should be handled by self-adaptation, and validating the model to assess the self-adaptation. Finally, mRUBiS allows developers to explore variants of adaptation engines (e.g., event-driven self-adaptation) and to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of the engines

Study of fault-tolerant software technology

Presented is an overview of the current state of the art of fault-tolerant software and an analysis of quantitative techniques and models developed to assess its impact. It examines research efforts as well as experience gained from commercial application of these techniques. The paper also addresses the computer architecture and design implications on hardware, operating systems and programming languages (including Ada) of using fault-tolerant software in real-time aerospace applications. It concludes that fault-tolerant software has progressed beyond the pure research state. The paper also finds that, although not perfectly matched, newer architectural and language capabilities provide many of the notations and functions needed to effectively and efficiently implement software fault-tolerance