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Towards assuring non-recurrence of faults leading to transaction outages: an experiment with stable business applications

Published: 24 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Reducing the cost and efforts for maintaining a legacy business application is a major challenge faced by the industry. Capturing faults at the early stage of software life cycle is known to prevent certain kinds of defects in production -- we exploit this aspect to detect a class of software faults introduced while making changes to stable business applications.
We discuss the results of an experiment with stable, back-office COBOL applications of a core banking system. With changes, the stable system exhibits frequent transaction outages (among other defects). We observed that most critical outages were due to few common causes, which were extremely difficult to identify by testing. We present our analysis and the results of the successful attempt to automatically detect the causes, using structural analysis and control flow analysis techniques.

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Niels Veerman and Ernst-Jan Verhoeven, Cobol Minefield Detection, SP&E, Volume 36 Issue 14, November 2006
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Cited By

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  • (2022)Fast Analysis of Evolving Software Systems2022 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)10.1109/ISSREW55968.2022.00038(49-54)Online publication date: Oct-2022
  • (2012)Precise Detection of Uninitialized Variables Using Dynamic Analysis - Extending to Aggregate and Vector TypesProceedings of the 2012 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering10.1109/WCRE.2012.29(197-201)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2012
  • (2011)Precise detection of un-initialized variables in large, real-life COBOL programs in presence of unrealizable pathsProceedings of the 2011 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance10.1109/ICSM.2011.6080812(448-456)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2011

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    ISEC '11: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
    February 2011
    229 pages
    ISBN:9781450305594
    DOI:10.1145/1953355
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • Computer Society of India: Computer Society of India

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 24 February 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. fault detection
    2. maintenance
    3. program analysis

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    ISEC '11
    Sponsor:
    • Computer Society of India
    ISEC '11: Indian Software Engineering Conference
    February 24 - 27, 2011
    Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 76 of 315 submissions, 24%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2022)Fast Analysis of Evolving Software Systems2022 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)10.1109/ISSREW55968.2022.00038(49-54)Online publication date: Oct-2022
    • (2012)Precise Detection of Uninitialized Variables Using Dynamic Analysis - Extending to Aggregate and Vector TypesProceedings of the 2012 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering10.1109/WCRE.2012.29(197-201)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2012
    • (2011)Precise detection of un-initialized variables in large, real-life COBOL programs in presence of unrealizable pathsProceedings of the 2011 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance10.1109/ICSM.2011.6080812(448-456)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2011

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