Software bugs often arise because of differences between what developers think their system does and what the system actually does. These differences frustrate debugging and comprehension efforts. We describe Perfume, an automated approach for inferring behavioral, resource-aware models of software systems from logs of their executions. These finite state machine models ease understanding of system behavior and resource use.
Perfume improves on the state of the art in model inference by differentiating behaviorally similar executions that differ in resource consumption. For example, Perfume separates otherwise identical requests that hit a cache from those that miss it, which can aid understanding how the cache affects system behavior and removing cache-related bugs. A small user study demonstrates that using Perfume is more effective than using logs and another model inference tool for system comprehension. A case study on the TCP protocol demonstrates that Perfume models can help understand non-trivial protocol behavior. Perfume models capture key system properties and improve system comprehension, while being reasonably robust to noise likely to occur in real-world executions.
@inproceedings{Ohmann14ase,
author = {Tony Ohmann and Michael Herzberg and Sebastian Fiss and
Armand Halbert and Marc Palyart and Ivan Beschastnikh and
Yuriy Brun},
title =
{\href{http://people.cs.umass.edu/brun/pubs/pubs/Ohmann14ase.pdf}{Behavioral
Resource-Aware Model Inference}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th IEEE/ACM International
Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)},
venue = {ASE},
pages = {19--30},
address = {V{\"{a}}ster{\aa}s, Sweden},
month = {September},
date = {15--19},
year = {2014},
accept = {$\frac{50}{258} \approx 19\%$},
doi = {10.1145/2642937.2642988},
note = {\href{https://doi.org/10.1145/2642937.2642988}{DOI: 10.1145/2642937.2642988}},
abstract = {<p>Software bugs often arise because of differences between what
developers think their system does and what the system actually does.
These differences frustrate debugging and comprehension efforts. We
describe Perfume, an automated approach for inferring behavioral,
resource-aware models of software systems from logs of their
executions. These finite state machine models ease understanding of
system behavior and resource use.</p>
<p>Perfume improves on the state of the art in model inference by
differentiating behaviorally similar executions that differ in
resource consumption. For example, Perfume separates otherwise
identical requests that hit a cache from those that miss it, which can
aid understanding how the cache affects system behavior and removing
cache-related bugs. A small user study demonstrates that using Perfume
is more effective than using logs and another model inference tool for
system comprehension. A case study on the TCP protocol demonstrates
that Perfume models can help understand non-trivial protocol behavior.
Perfume models capture key system properties and improve system
comprehension, while being reasonably robust to noise likely to occur
in real-world executions.</p>},
fundedBy = {NSERC, Microsoft Research via a SEIF award},
}