TY - CHAP
T1 - A Control Flow Representation for Component-Based Software Reliability Analysis
AU - Mohamed, Atef
AU - Zulkernine, Mohammad
N1 - Current reliability analysis techniques encounter a prohibitive challenge with respect to the control flow representation of large software systems with intricate control flow structures. Some techniques use a component-based Control Flow Graph (CFG) structure which represents only inter-component control flow transitions.
PY - 2012/8/6
Y1 - 2012/8/6
N2 - Current reliability analysis techniques encounter a prohibitive challenge with respect to the control flow representation of large software systems with intricate control flow structures. Some techniques use a component-based Control Flow Graph (CFG) structure which represents only inter-component control flow transitions. This CFG structure disregards the dependencies among multiple outward control flow transitions of a system component and does not provide any details about a component internal control flow structure. To overcome these problems, some techniques use statement-based or block-based CFGs. However, these CFG structures are remarkably complex and difficult to use for large software systems. In this paper, we propose a simple CFG structure called Connection Dependency Graph (CDG) that represents inter-component and intra-component control flow transitions and preserves the dependencies among them. We describe the CDG structure and explain how to derive it from a program source code. Our derivation exploits a number of architectural patterns to capture the control flow transitions and identify the execution paths among connections. We provide a case study to examine the effect of program size on the CDG, the statement-based, and the block-based CFGs by comparing them with respect to complexity using the PostgreSQL open source database system.
AB - Current reliability analysis techniques encounter a prohibitive challenge with respect to the control flow representation of large software systems with intricate control flow structures. Some techniques use a component-based Control Flow Graph (CFG) structure which represents only inter-component control flow transitions. This CFG structure disregards the dependencies among multiple outward control flow transitions of a system component and does not provide any details about a component internal control flow structure. To overcome these problems, some techniques use statement-based or block-based CFGs. However, these CFG structures are remarkably complex and difficult to use for large software systems. In this paper, we propose a simple CFG structure called Connection Dependency Graph (CDG) that represents inter-component and intra-component control flow transitions and preserves the dependencies among them. We describe the CDG structure and explain how to derive it from a program source code. Our derivation exploits a number of architectural patterns to capture the control flow transitions and identify the execution paths among connections. We provide a case study to examine the effect of program size on the CDG, the statement-based, and the block-based CFGs by comparing them with respect to complexity using the PostgreSQL open source database system.
UR - https://doi.org/10.1109/SERE.2012.33
U2 - 10.1109/SERE.2012.33
DO - 10.1109/SERE.2012.33
M3 - Chapter
BT - Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Secure System Integration and Reliability Improvement (SERE’12)
ER -