Simplifying Contract-Violating Traces
This addresses debugging challenges for software developers dealing with contract violations, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing monitoring techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing long traces from contract violations in software by proposing a methodology and tool for simplifying traces to aid debugging.
Contract conformance is hard to determine statically, prior to the deployment of large pieces of software. A scalable alternative is to monitor for contract violations post-deployment: once a violation is detected, the trace characterising the offending execution is analysed to pinpoint the source of the offence. A major drawback with this technique is that, often, contract violations take time to surface, resulting in long traces that are hard to analyse. This paper proposes a methodology together with an accompanying tool for simplifying traces and assisting contract-violation debugging.