Analysis techniques for software maintenance
- Autores: Sergio Pérez Rubio
- Directores de la Tesis: Josep Francesc Silva Galiana (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de València ( España ) en 2023
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Germán Vidal Oriola (presid.), Adrián Riesco Rodríguez (secret.), Demis Ballis (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Informática por la Universitat Politècnica de València
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: RiuNet
- Resumen
We live in a society where digitalisation is present in our everyday life. We wake up with the alarm of our mobile phone, book our meetings in our digital calendar, save all our media in the cloud storage, and spend time in social networks almost daily. Every one of these tasks is run over a software system that ensures its correct functionality. This massive digitalisation has made software development to shoot up in the last years. During the lifetime of software systems, the maintenance process entails a waste of billions of dollars every year. The cause of this waste is the occurrence of bugs or errors undetected during the software production, which result in a malfunction of the system. For this reason, error detection and localisation techniques, such as testing, verification, or debugging, are a key factor to ensure software quality.
Although many different techniques are used for the debugging, testing, and verification of software systems, this thesis focus on only some of them. In particular, this thesis presents improvements in the program slicing technique (debugging field), a new approach for regression testing (testing field), and a new implementation of the design-by-contract verification model for the Erlang programming language (verification field).
The improvements proposed for the program slicing technique include several enhancements applicable to different scenarios: (i) improvements in the representation and slicing of object-oriented programs, (ii) enhancements in the representation and slicing of (possibly recursive) complex data structures (objects, arrays, lists, tuples, records, etc.), (iii) a new graph model based on a fine-grained representation of programs that augments the expressivity of the graph and provides more accurate slicing results, and (iv) a new technique to compute minimal slices for a program given a set of specific program inputs.
On the other side, the new approach for regression testing is called point of interest testing, and it introduces the possibility of automatically comparing the behaviour of any arbitrary point in the code given two versions of the same software system.
Finally, the thesis presents a new implementation of the design-by-contract verification model for the Erlang programming language, where new types of contracts are explained in detail for both the sequential and concurrent parts of Erlang.
All the analyses presented here have been formally defined and their correctness have been proved, ensuring that the results will have the reliability degree needed for real-life systems. Another contribution of this thesis is the implementation of two program slicers for two different programming languages (Java and Erlang), a tool to perform point of interest testing for the Erlang programming language, and a system to run design-by-contract verification in Erlang. It is worth mentioning that all the tools implemented in this thesis are open source and publicly available, so they can be used or extended by any interested researcher.
