I-Corps: Automatically Localizing Functional Faults In Deployed Software Applications

很少有问题比现场故障对人们造成的负面影响更大，即部署的软件行为不正确。就像不同的人体解剖结构会阻止医疗专业人员根据症状快速诊断疾病一样，生产故障定位需要软件专业人员付出巨大的努力，因为每个软件应用程序都有自己独特的结构，即使是较小的应用程序，程序员也必须花费大量时间来理解它。现场故障不仅会打击客户对软件应用程序的信心，而且还会付出高昂的代价，有时甚至会造成人员伤亡，因为软件应用程序支持我们生活的方方面面。尽管有数百种不同的故障定位方法，但针对现场故障自动定位生产故障的问题一直没有得到解决。一个问题是，在部署应用程序时，根据定义不知道生产故障，因此运行现有测试套件是不适用的。只有当部署的应用程序中出现现场故障时，程序员才能开始分析症状，以确定是什么故障导致了这些故障。修复时间至关重要，因为应用程序的停机时间通常会造成每分钟数千美元的损失。目前，没有一种解决方案可以仅使用现场故障的症状和输入值，并且不部署仪表化应用程序，并且不收集任何运行时数据，并且不使用Oracle进行任何测试，不执行成功和失败的运行，并且不收集来自现场故障的大量状态信息，就可以高精度地自动定位所部署的软件应用程序中的功能生产故障。I-Corps团队提出了一种新颖的研究计划，用于自动定位应用程序中功能现场故障的故障(发音为al-Five)，使利益相关者能够输入在部署给定应用程序期间发生的故障症状以及输入和配置参数值，ALF5将在代码中返回可能包含特定故障的位置，并建议对这些位置的代码进行修改，以修复这些故障。失败的症状包括但不限于输出值不正确、程序崩溃和计算花费的时间比预期的要长得多，可能表明无限循环。该团队计划探索与潜在客户合作，这些客户可以提供值得生产的系统，在这些系统上展示拟议的创新，并能够帮助团队将其创新扩大到商业交付。拟议中的创新最有可能的市场是：软件系统开发商，如IBM Global Services和Sapient and Accenture；业务流程外包公司，如德勤和CSC，代表客户托管复杂的应用程序；以及拥有复杂的生产中定制系统的公司，如保险处理、运输物流。

Very few problems impact people more negatively than field failures, where deployed software behaves incorrectly. Just like distinct human anatomies would prevent medical professionals from quickly diagnosing diseases using symptoms, production fault localization requires a huge effort from software professionals, since each software application has its own unique structure and programmers must spend a lot of time to understand it even for smaller applications. Not only do field failures zap customer confidence in software applications, but also they cost dearly, sometimes in human lives, since software applications support all aspects of our lives. Despite hundreds of different approaches for fault localization, the problem of localizing production faults for field failures automatically is unsolved. A problem is that production faults are not known by definition when the application is deployed, therefore running existing test suites is not applicable. Only when field failures occur in a deployed application can programmers start analyzing the symptoms to determine what faults cause them. Time to fix is critical, since the applications' downtime often costs thousands of dollars per minute. Currently, there is no solution that can automatically localize functional production faults in deployed software applications with a high degree of precision using only symptoms of the field failures and input values and without deploying instrumented applications and without collecting any runtime data and without having any tests with oracles, without performing successful and failed runs, and without collecting large amounts of state information from field failures. This I-Corps team proposes a novel research program for Automatically Localizing Faults For Functional Field Failures in Applications (pronounced as al-five) that enables stakeholders to enter symptoms of a failure that occurs during deployment of a given application and the input and configuration parameter values, and ALF5 will return locations in the code that are likely to contain specific faults and it recommends modifications to the code at these locations that can fix these faults. Examples of symptoms of failures include but not limited to incorrect output values, program crashes and computations that take much more time that they are supposed to, possibly indicating infinite loops. The team plans to explore partnering with potential customers who can provide production worthy systems upon which to demonstrate the proposed innovation and can help the team scale up its innovation to commercial delivery. The most likely markets for the proposed innovation are: software systems developers, like IBM Global Services and Sapient and Accenture; business process outsourcing firms like Deloitte and CSC, that host complex applications on behalf of customers; and companies with complex in-production custom systems, e.g., insurance processing, transportation logistics.