Constraint-Based Behavioral Consistency of Evolving Software Systems

Any complex software system exhibits a tension between the technical perspective required for its realization and the user-level perspective. We term this the “how-what gap”, represented by the questions “how is a system implemented” vs. “what is its functionality/usage”. The normative, anticipated behavior of a software system as envisaged during its development and the de facto, observed behavior emerging after its continued operation tends to drift apart, resulting in behavioral inconsistency. We discuss how behavioral consistency in software systems can be captured in technical and formal terms, we sketch a possible tool chain that could support it, and we describe some of the research challenges that must be solved. Our main idea is to combine software analysis approaches represented by various forms of static analysis and formal verification with runtime verification, monitoring, and automata learning in order to optimally leverage the de facto observed behaviour of the deployed systems.

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