Run-time monitoring of architecturally significant behaviors using behavioral profiles and aspects

ABSTRACT

Although static structures are often advocated as the main ingredient of a software architecture, dynamic program behavior forms an essential part of it. Verifying the behavior is a crucial yet often troublesome part of testing. Hence, it is of great concern to find means to facilitate the testing of dynamic behaviors. This paper studies one approach to such behavioral monitoring. The details of the approach are the following. We have used the concept of behavioral profiles to specify the desired program behavior using UML. Provided with a behavioral profile created with a CASE tool, we are able to automatically generate AspectJ aspects that are woven into Java program code, thus adding a monitoring concern to the system. This results in the opportunity to monitor architecturally significant behaviors defined with architectural profiles at code level. Towards the end of the paper, we study the applicability of the approach in industrial use.

REFERENCES

• 1: J. Airaksinen, K. Koskimies, J. Koskinen, J. Peltonen, P. Selonen, M. Siikarla, and T. Systä. xUMLi: Towards a tool-independent UML processing platform. In Proceedings of the Nordic Workshop on Software Development Tools and Techniques, pages 1-16, Copenhagen, Denmark, Aug. 2002. IT University of Copenhagen.
• 2: The AspectJ Team, http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/doc/released/progguide/. The AspectJ Programming Guide, 2003.
• 3: R. E. Filman, T. Elrad, S. Clarke, and M. Ak, sit, editors. Aspect-Oriented Software Development. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2005.
• 4: Robert B. France , Dae-Kyoo Kim , Sudipto Ghosh , Eunjee Song, A UML-Based Pattern Specification Technique, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.30 n.3, p.193-206, March 2004 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2004.1271174]
• 5: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 6: James Gosling , Bill Joy , Guy L. Steele, The Java Language Specification, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1996
• 7: I. Groher and S. Schulze. Generating aspect code from UML models. In F. Akkawi, O. Aldawud, G. Booch, S. Clarke, J. Gray, B. Harrison,M. Kandé, D. Stein, P. Tarr, and A. Zakaria, editors, The 4th AOSD Modeling With UML Workshop, 2003.
• 8: IEEE Computer Society. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2004), 23-28 May 2004, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. IEEE Computer Society, 2004.
• 9: G. Kiczales, J. Lamping, A. Mendhekar, Maede, C., C. Lopes, J. M. Loingtier, and J. Irwin. Aspect-oriented programming. In Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP '97), pages 220--242. Springer-Verlag, June 1997.
• 10: K. Kiviluoma, J. Koskinen, and T. Mikkonen. Run-time monitoring of behavioral profiles with aspects. In Proceedings of the NWUML'2005: the 3rd Nordic Workshop on UML and Software Modeling, pages 62--76. Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, 2005.
• 11: J. Koskinen, K. Koskimies, T. Mikkonen, and T. Systä. Profile-based checking of behavioral consistency. In Proceedings of Consistency in Model Driven Engineering (CoMoDe) Workshop of the European Conference on MDA - Foundations and Applications (ECMDA), November 2005.
• 12: Erkki Mäkinen , Tarja Systä, MAS — an interactive synthesizer to support behavioral modelling in UML, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering, p.15-24, May 12-19, 2001, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 13: Maven. http://maven.apache.org/, 2005.
• 14: Object Management Group, Inc. OMG Unified Modeling Language (UML) Specification/03-03-01, March 2003. Version 1.5.
• 15: Object Management Group, Inc. Unified Modeling Language: Superstructure version 2.0 Final Adopted Specification ptc/03-08-02, August 2003. Version 2.0.
• 16: Rational Software, http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational. Rational Rose, 2005.
• 17: M. Richters and M. Gogolla. Aspect-oriented monitoring of UML and OCL constraints. In F. Akkawi, O. Aldawud, G. Booch, S. Clarke, J. Gray, B. Harrison, M. Kandé, D. Stein, P. Tarr, and A. Zakaria, editors, The 4th AOSD Modeling With UML Workshop, 2003.
• 18: Claudio Riva , Petri Selonen , Tarja Systa , Jianli Xu, UML-Based Reverse Engineering and Model Analysis Approaches for Software Architecture Maintenance, Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.50-59, September 11-14, 2004
• 19: Petri Selonen , Jianli Xu, Validating UML models against architectural profiles, Proceedings of the 9th European software engineering conference held jointly with 11th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, September 01-05, 2003, Helsinki, Finland
• 20: The Spring Framework. http://www.springframework.org, 2005.
• 21: V. Stolz and E. Bodden. Temporal Assertions using AspectJ. In RV'05 - Fifth Workshop on Runtime Verification, July 2005.
• 22: Sebastian Uchitel , Jeff Kramer , Jeff Magee, Synthesis of Behavioral Models from Scenarios, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.29 n.2, p.99-115, February 2003 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2003.1178048]
• 23: Jon Whittle , Johann Schumann, Generating statechart designs from scenarios, Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering, p.314-323, June 04-11, 2000, Limerick, Ireland [doi>10.1145/337180.337217]
• 24: Hong Yan , David Garlan , Bradley Schmerl , Jonathan Aldrich , Rick Kazman, DiscoTect: A System for Discovering Architectures from Running Systems, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.470-479, May 23-28, 2004
• 25: Tewfic Ziadi , Loic Helouet , Jean-Marc Jezequel, Revisiting Statechart Synthesis with an Algebraic Approach, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.242-251, May 23-28, 2004

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Testing tools (e.g., data generators, coverage testing)

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications
          Subjects: Tools

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Experimentation

Keywords:
aspectJ, behavioral profile, monitoring, software architecture