Staccato: A Bug Finder for Dynamic Configuration Updates

Authors John Toman, Dan Grossman



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John Toman
Dan Grossman

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John Toman and Dan Grossman. Staccato: A Bug Finder for Dynamic Configuration Updates. In 30th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2016). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 56, pp. 24:1-24:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2016)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.24

Abstract

Modern software applications are highly configurable, allowing configuration options to be changed even during program execution. When dynamic configuration updating is implemented incorrectly, program errors can result. These program errors occur primarily when stale data—computed from old configurations—or inconsistent data—computed from different configurations—are used. We introduce Staccato, the first tool designed to detect these errors. Staccato uses a dynamic analysis in the style of taint analysis to find the use of stale configuration data in Java programs. It supports concurrent programs running on commodity JVMs. In some cases, Staccato can provide automatic bug avoidance and semi-automatic repair when errors occur. We evaluated Staccato on 3 open-source applications that support complex reconfigurability. Staccato found multiple errors in all of them. Staccato requires only modest annotation overhead and has moderate performance overhead.
Keywords
  • Dynamic Configuration Updates
  • Dynamic Analysis
  • Software configuration

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