Detecting distributed software components that will not cause emergent behavior in asynchronous communication style

Abstract

In distributed software systems (DSS) the functionality and/or control are distributed. This may cause the DSS components to show an unexpected behavior known as emergent behavior in the run time, which was not seen in their requirements and design. Emergent behaviors can have irreparable damages for companies. The savings in cost of detecting and fixing emergent behaviors in early phases is more than 20 times compared to fixing them after the deployment. The detecting methodologies usually utilize behavioral modeling which can face to state space explosion problem for large scale systems. Therefore, we approach this problem by detecting components that will not show emergent behavior and remove them from further analysis to help the scalability of these approaches. Previously, we have devised and implemented the algorithm for synchronous communications. In this paper, the extension of our method for detecting these components in the asynchronous communication style is presented which is closer to the real-world systems. The details of the technique and related algorithms are discussed.