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Software Is Not Soft

Challenges and Approaches to Dynamic Software Update

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Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems (SETSS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11174))

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Abstract

It is widely desired that running software systems can be updated on the fly in response to the changes in the environment they are situated in and in the requirements they must satisfy. Systematic support for dynamic software update must make it safe, efficient and easy to use. This chapter overviews related work and our efforts on dynamic software update at three different levels of granularity: code-level update of Java programs, component-level update of distributed systems, and process-level instance migration of workflow processes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://continuous-se.org.

  2. 2.

    Continuous deployment techniques such as Blue-Green Deployment [23] will not be discussed because they do not actually update running software but gradually redirect clients from the service provided by old version software to that of the new version, with the assumption that clients are independent with each other.

  3. 3.

    For ease of reading and to focus on the software engineering issues of DSU, in this chapter definitions and propositions are often presented informally or semi-formally, and intuitive concepts are used without definitions. Interested readers are referred to the original publications for complete and rigorous treatment of the subjects.

  4. 4.

    http://moon.nju.edu.cn/dse/javelus/.

  5. 5.

    http://openjdk.java.net/groups/hotspot/.

  6. 6.

    http://mina.apache.org/sshd-project/index.html.

  7. 7.

    A more complete description of the procedure can be found at http://moon.nju.edu.cn/dse/javelus/a-tutorial-of-javelus.

  8. 8.

    http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaee/.

  9. 9.

    http://www.osgi.org/.

  10. 10.

    Here the notion of transaction is weaker than the ACID transaction of database systems. It is only assumed that all local transactions are consistent and isolated.

  11. 11.

    In their paper [3], Kramer and Magee used the term transaction to mean “an exchange of information between two and only two nodes”, which was different from our use of the term. To avoid confusion, we rename it to interaction in Definition 2. This also applies for Definition 3 below.

  12. 12.

    http://tuscany.apache.org/.

  13. 13.

    http://www.oasis-opencsa.org/sca.

  14. 14.

    The meaning of process in the community of business process management and workflow management is different from its use in programming language and operating system communities. The former is a static concept just like a program or a schema, whose runtime instance is corresponding to the latter use of the term.

  15. 15.

    This is a simplified version of the running example used in [30], to which interested readers are referred for more comprehensive process definition and explanations.

  16. 16.

    It must be acyclic because multiple occurrences of a same activity in \(\sigma \) are modeled as different nodes in the graph.

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Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Luciano Baresi, Carlo Ghezzi, Hans-Arno Jacobsen, Jian Lü, Valerio Panzica La Manna and other co-authors for their collaboration in previous work on dynamic software update. In addition, Xiaoxing Ma would like to thank his colleagues Yu Huang and Chang Xu whose work on environment perception were also discussed at SETSS 2017. Our work on DSU was supported by the National 973 Program of China (Grant No. 2015CB352202), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61690204, 61761136003, 61472177), and the Collaborative Innovation Center of Novel Software Technology and Industrialization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Institute of Computer Software, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Xiaoxing Ma & Tianxiao Gu

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Wei Song

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  1. Xiaoxing Ma
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  2. Tianxiao Gu
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Correspondence to Xiaoxing Ma .

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  1. London South Bank University, London, UK

    Jonathan P. Bowen

  2. Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Zhiming Liu

  3. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Zili Zhang

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Ma, X., Gu, T., Song, W. (2018). Software Is Not Soft. In: Bowen, J., Liu, Z., Zhang, Z. (eds) Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems. SETSS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11174. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02928-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02928-9_5

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