Workshop on Self-Healing Systems (WOSS '02). Affiliated with the 10th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-10), Charleston, South Carolina, November 2002.
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Software that people use for everyday purposes is usually not mission critical -- some failures can be tolerated. However, this software should be dependable enough for its intended use, even when users change expectations. Software systems that could adapt to accommodate both failures and changing user expectations could significantly improve the dependability of such everyday software. Many adaptation techniques require specifications of proper behavior (for detecting improper behavior) and problem severity, alternatives and their selection (for mitigation and for repair).
However, the specifications of everyday software are usually incomplete and
imprecise. This makes it difficult to determine the dependability of the
software and even more difficult to adapt.
We address the problem of detecting anomalies -- deviations from expected
behavior -- when specifications of expected behavior are missing. Setting up
anomaly detection depends on human participation, yielding predicates that can
serve as proxies for missing specifications.
We propose a template mechanism to lower the demands on human attention when
setting up detection. We show how this mechanism may be used in our framework
for enhancing dynamic data feeds with automatic adaptation. We discuss how the
same mechanism may be used in repair. Our emphasis is on detecting semantic
anomalies: cases in which the data feed is responsive and delivers well-formed
results, but these results are unreasonable.
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