Toward a UCM-Based Approach for Recovering System Availability Requirements from Execution Traces

Abstract

Software maintenance accounts for a significant proportion of the cost of the software life cycle. Software engineers must spend a considerable amount of time understanding the software system functional attributes and non-functional (e.g., availability, security, etc.) aspects prior to performing a maintenance task. In this paper, we propose a dynamic analysis approach to recover availability requirements from system execution traces. Availability requirements are described and visualized using the Use Case Maps (UCM) language of the ITU-T User Requirements Notation (URN) standard, extended with availability annotations. Our UCM-based approach allows for capturing availability requirements at higher levels of abstraction from low-level execution traces. The resulting availability UCM models can then be analyzed to reveal system availability shortcomings. In order to illustrate and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we apply it to a case study of a network implementing the HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol) redundancy protocol.