Evolve the Model Universe of a System Universe

Uncertain, unpredictable, real time, and lifelong evolution causes operational failures in intelligent software systems, leading to significant damages, safety and security hazards, and tragedies. To fully unleash the potential of such systems and facilitate their wider adoption, ensuring the trustworthiness of their decision making under uncertainty is the prime challenge. To overcome this challenge, an intelligent software system and its operating environment should be continuously monitored, tested, and refined during its lifetime operation. Existing technologies, such as digital twins, can enable continuous synchronisation with such systems to reflect their most updated states. Such representations are often in the form of prior knowledge based and machine learning models, together called model universe. In this paper, we present our vision of combining techniques from software engineering, evolutionary computation, and machine learning to support the model universe evolution

Tortoise: Interactive System Configuration Repair

System configuration languages provide powerful abstractions that simplify managing large-scale, networked systems. Thousands of organizations now use configuration languages, such as Puppet. However, specifications written in configuration languages can have bugs and the shell remains the simplest way to debug a misconfigured system. Unfortunately, it is unsafe to use the shell to fix problems when a system configuration language is in use: a fix applied from the shell may cause the system to drift from the state specified by the configuration language. Thus, despite their advantages, configuration languages force system administrators to give up the simplicity and familiarity of the shell. This paper presents a synthesis-based technique that allows administrators to use configuration languages and the shell in harmony. Administrators can fix errors using the shell and the technique automatically repairs the higher-level specification written in the configuration language. The approach (1) produces repairs that are consistent with the fix made using the shell; (2) produces repairs that are maintainable by minimizing edits made to the original specification; (3) ranks and presents multiple repairs when relevant; and (4) supports all shells the administrator may wish to use. We implement our technique for Puppet, a widely used system configuration language, and evaluate it on a suite of benchmarks under 42 repair scenarios. The top-ranked repair is selected by humans 76% of the time and the human-equivalent repair is ranked 1.31 on average.Comment: Published version in proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 201

Genetic Improvement of Software: a Comprehensive Survey

Genetic improvement (GI) uses automated search to find improved versions of existing software. We present a comprehensive survey of this nascent field of research with a focus on the core papers in the area published between 1995 and 2015. We identified core publications including empirical studies, 96% of which use evolutionary algorithms (genetic programming in particular). Although we can trace the foundations of GI back to the origins of computer science itself, our analysis reveals a significant upsurge in activity since 2012. GI has resulted in dramatic performance improvements for a diverse set of properties such as execution time, energy and memory consumption, as well as results for fixing and extending existing system functionality. Moreover, we present examples of research work that lies on the boundary between GI and other areas, such as program transformation, approximate computing, and software repair, with the intention of encouraging further exchange of ideas between researchers in these fields

An automated approach to program repair with semantic code search

Every year software companies dedicate numerous developer hours to debugging and fixing defects. Automated program repair has the potential to greatly decrease the costs of debugging. Existing automated repair techniques, such as Genprog, TSPRepair, and AE, show great promise but are not able to repair all bugs. We propose a new automated program repair technique, SearchRepair, which is a complementary program repair technique. We take advantage of existing open source code to find potential fixes based on the assumption that there are correct implementations in open source project code for some defects. The key challenges lie in efficiently finding code semantically similar (but not identical) to defective code and then appropriately integrating that code into the buggy program. The technique we present, SearchRepair, addresses these challenges by (1) encoding a large database of human-written code fragments as SMT constraints on input-output behavior, (2) localizing a given defect to likely-buggy program fragments, (3) dynamically analyzing those buggy fragments to derive input-output pairs that describe likely buggy behavior and that can be encoded as SMT constraints, (4) using state-of-the-art constraint solvers to find fragments in the code database that satisfy those constraints, and (5) validating patches that repair the bug against program test suites. We evaluate our technique, SearchRepair, on a program repair benchmark set IntroClass, which provides 998 buggy programs written by novice students, two test suites for each program, and repair results for existing program repair technique, Genprog, TSPRepair and AE. The two test suites, of which one is written by a human and the other one is automatically generated by a computer, are used to determine if a program is buggy and to evaluate the quality of a repair. We use instructor test suite to refer the test suite that is written by a human. And we use KLEE test suite to refer the test suite that are generated by the computer. We consider a program as a potential fixable defect if it fails and passes at least one test case in a test suite. Note that extracting input-output behaviors for the semantic code search requires that at least one passed test case so some buggy programs are excluded from our evaluation. There are 778 defects in IntroClass based on the instructor test suite and 845 defects in IntroClass based on the KLEE test suite. We find that when using the instructor test suite, SearchRepair is able to successfully repair 150 of 778 defects, Gengprog is able to fix 287 defects, TSPRepair is able to fix 247 defects, AE is able to fix 159 defects. In total, these 4 techniques are able to fix 310 defects using the instructor test suite and 20 of the 310 defects can only be fixed by SearchRepair. We also find that when using the computer generated test suite, there are 58 unique defects that can only fixed by SearchRepair out of 339 total unique defects that can be fixed by the 4 techniques. These results suggest that SearchRepair is a complementary technique to existing program repair techniques

Evolutionary Search Techniques with Strong Heuristics for Multi-Objective Feature Selection in Software Product Lines

Software design is a process of trading off competing objectives. If the user objective space is rich, then we should use optimizers that can fully exploit that richness. For example, this study configures software product lines (expressed as feature models) using various search-based software engineering methods. Our main result is that as we increase the number of optimization objectives, the methods in widespread use (e.g. NSGA-II, SPEA2) perform much worse than IBEA (Indicator-Based Evolutionary Algorithm). IBEA works best since it makes most use of user preference knowledge. Hence it does better on the standard measures (hypervolume and spread) but it also generates far more products with 0 violations of domain constraints. We also present significant improvements to IBEA\u27s performance by employing three strong heuristic techniques that we call PUSH, PULL, and seeding. The PUSH technique forces the evolutionary search to respect certain rules and dependencies defined by the feature models, while the PULL technique gives higher weight to constraint satisfaction as an optimization objective and thus achieves a higher percentage of fully-compliant configurations within shorter runtimes. The seeding technique helps in guiding very large feature models to correct configurations very early in the optimization process. Our conclusion is that the methods we apply in search-based software engineering need to be carefully chosen, particularly when studying complex decision spaces with many optimization objectives. Also, we conclude that search methods must be customized to fit the problem at hand. Specifically, the evolutionary search must respect domain constraints

Evolutionary computing driven search based software testing and correction

For a given program, testing, locating the errors identified, and correcting those errors is a critical, yet expensive process. The field of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) addresses these phases by formulating them as search problems. This dissertation addresses these challenging problems through the use of two complimentary evolutionary computing based systems. The first one is the Fitness Guided Fault Localization (FGFL) system, which novelly uses a specification based fitness function to perform fault localization. The second is the Coevolutionary Automated Software Correction (CASC) system, which employs a variety of evolutionary computing techniques to perform testing, correction, and verification of software. In support of the real world application of these systems, a practitioner\u27s guide to fitness function design is provided. For the FGFL system, experimental results are presented that demonstrate the applicability of fitness guided fault localization to automate this important phase of software correction in general, and the potential of the FGFL system in particular. For the fitness function design guide, the performance of a guide generated fitness function is compared to that of an expert designed fitness function demonstrating the competitiveness of the guide generated fitness function. For the CASC system, results are presented that demonstrate the system\u27s abilities on a series of problems of both increasing size as well as number of bugs present. The system presented solutions more than 90% of the time for versions of the programs containing one or two bugs. Additionally, scalability results are presented for the CASC system that indicate that success rate linearly decreases with problem size and that the estimated convergence rate scales at worst linearly with problem size --Abstract, page ii

Otimização para reduzir o tamanho de código-fonte JavaScript

JavaScript is one of the most used programming languages for front-end development of Web application. The increase in complexity of front-end features brings concerns about performance, especially the load and execution time of JavaScript code. To reduce the size of JavaScript programs and, therefore, the time required to load and execute these programs in the front-end of Web applications. To characterize the variants of JavaScript programs and use this information to build a search procedure that scans such variants for smaller implementations that pass all test cases. We applied this procedure to 19 JavaScript programs varying from 92 to 15,602 LOC and observed reductions from 0.2% to 73.8% of the original code, as well as a relationship between the quality of a program’s test suite and the ability to reduce its size.Esta Tese aborda o problema de otimização de tempo de carga de software, especificamente software escrito na linguagem de programação JavaScript, uma linguagem interpretada, baseada em objetos e amplamente utilizada no desenvolvimento de aplicativos e sistemas para a internet. Estudos experimentais foram projetados para avaliar a hipótese de que técnicas heurísticas já aplicadas com sucesso em linguagens orientadas a objeto poderiam ter resultados positivos na redução do tempo de carga de programas escritos em JavaScript. Para tanto, um ferramental que permitisse observar a aplicação de heurísticas selecionadas em programas JavaScript foi construído e executado em um ambiente de computação de alto desempenho. Os resultados dos estudos preliminares foram utilizados para criar um procedimento de busca que varre o código JavaScript criando variantes do programa que sejam menores e passem em todos os casos de teste do programa original. Aplicamos este procedimento a 19 programas JavaScript, variando de 92 a 15.602 linhas de código, e observamos reduções de 0,2% a 73,8% do código original, bem como uma relação entre a qualidade do conjunto de casos de testes e a capacidade de reduzir o tamanho dos programas

Multi-objective Coevolutionary Automated Software Correction

For a given program, testing, locating the errors identified, and correcting those errors is a critical, yet expensive process. The field of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) addresses these phases by formulating them as search problems. The Coevolutionary Automated Software Correction (CASC) system targets the correction phase by coevolving test cases and programs at the source code level. This paper presents the latest version of the CASC system featuring multi-objective optimization and an enhanced representation language. Results are presented demonstrating CASC\u27s ability to successfully correct five seeded bugs in two non-trivial programs from the Siemens test suite. Additionally, evidence is provided substantiating the hypothesis that multi-objective optimization is beneficial to SBSE