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Testing adaptation policies for software components

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Abstract

Self-adaptive systems have to implement adaptation policies described by sets of rules that express how the components are reconfigured within the system, the priority of a given reconfiguration to happen, when a given (sequence of) event(s) occurs, and when specific conditions on the system state are satisfied. However, when this priority is given by a fuzzy value (e.g., high, medium, low) depending on external and internal events, it has to be implemented inside the software with particular implementation choices made. This paper is dedicated to the validation of adaptation policies, using a model-based testing approach and a verdict establishment that is based on both the runtime verification of temporal properties, and the detection of inconsistencies between the adaptation policy and the reconfigurations implemented in the self-adaptive system. We propose means to establish a test verdict based on the respect of the adaptation policy by the implementation, along with coverage measures of the rules. This provides interesting feedback on the adaptation policy rules, allowing to detect reconfigurations that should not have occurred, high-priority reconfigurations that are never triggered, or low-priority reconfigurations that are too frequently executed, potential inconsistencies in the rules, or wrong interpretation of priorities. The test verdict is made based on the analysis of the execution traces of the system, which is stimulated using a usage model that describes the probabilities of external events to occur. An experiment, performed on a vehicular ad-hoc network of autonomous vehicles, illustrates the interest of the approach.

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Notes

  1. Notably \(\mathbb {B}_{4} = \{ \top , \top ^{p}, \bot ^{p}, \bot \}\) and \(\mathbb {B}_{2} = \{ \top , \bot \}\) where ⊤ (resp. ⊥) stands for true (resp. false) and ⊤p (resp. ⊥p) stands for potentially true (resp. potentially false).

  2. FTPL stands for TPL (temporal pattern language) prefixed by “F” to denote its relation to fractal-like components and to first-order consistency constraints over them.

  3. As in Chauvel et al. (2008); Dormoy and Kouchnarenko (2010), fuzzy values (e.g., in {, ,}) are used to express this need.

  4. We assume that if an event does not label an outgoing transition of the current state, its probability is 0.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FEMTO-ST Institute, University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté, CNRS, 15B Avenue des Montboucons, 25030, Besançon, Cedex, France

    Frédéric Dadeau, Jean-Philippe Gros & Olga Kouchnarenko

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  1. Frédéric Dadeau
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  2. Jean-Philippe Gros
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  3. Olga Kouchnarenko
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Correspondence to Frédéric Dadeau.

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Dadeau, F., Gros, JP. & Kouchnarenko, O. Testing adaptation policies for software components. Software Qual J 28, 1347–1378 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-019-09487-w

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