Self-healing strategies for component integration faults

Abstract

Software systems increasingly integrate Off-The-Shelf (OTS) components. However, due to the lack of knowledge about the reused OTS components, this integration is fragile and can cause in the field a lot of failures that result in dramatic consequences for users and service providers, e.g. loss of data, functionalities, money and reputation. As a consequence, dynamic and automatic fixing of integration problems in systems that include OTS components can be extremely beneficial to increase their reliability and mitigate these risks. In this paper, we present a technique for enhancing component-based systems with capabilities to self-heal common integration faults by using a predetermined set of healing strategies. The set of faults that can be healed has been determined from the analysis of the most frequent integration bugs experienced by users according to data in bug repositories available on Internet. An implementation based on AOP techniques shows the viability of this technique to heal faults in real case studies.