The ReliableSystems projects seek to develop approaches which will improve the reliability of complex software systems. We focus on both the software development process and products. Why is it so hard to develop reliable software? Our goal is first the identification and
characterization of reliability problems within applications by
the analysis of the source program, dynamic testing, and user
studies. How did the software not work properly? Did it
crash or reboot the machine, abort the application,
or perhaps silently fail and produced incorrect results.
Our second goal is to identify common programming
problems and then approaches for mitigating the problem without
enforcing added complexity or severe restrictions upon the
programmer. Many causes of software reliability problems
include: non-orthoginal error reporting, lack of knowledge
management during the software development processing, and an
over-abstraction of the computer system. Research Projects FlakyIO is an extreme I/O testing project that examines the ability of applications to handle exceptions. We use callee-generated software exception generation to determine an application's ability to handle error conditions. The concept of the FlakyIO architecture can be applied to any subsystem or module that generates an exception for the caller to handle. We chose to explore I/O because I/O has a well-known standard for error generation. We are able to test a large number of applications without having to customize the exception generation. Guide to writing your own FlakyIO system Program Data Characteristics is an approach that helps guide a programmer by explaining how data is currently being used in the application. For example, while you may not have identified a variable as a const, does it act like one? Thread Analysis shows program characteristics to help eliminate thread problems. Our approach is to identify the thread safe code. Rather than force a developer to look at the entire application base, simply eliminate what we know is thread-safe. Null Pointer Analysis examines the pointers that are passed into subroutines. What subroutines fail to check the pointers to make sure a NULL pointer has not been passed in and indirected upon, causing a crash. If the subroutine does not protect itself, then the caller should. We simply let you know where the vulnerabilities are. SCUM is a static program analysis mechanism for providing a robustness metric of an application. The identification of general robustness problems can be used to provide feedback to the programmer to direct the manual insertion of error checks into the application code at the most appropriate location. Guide to writing UML Software Specificiations Courses and Seminars Structures of Programming Languages is an analytical examination of modern high-level programming language structures, including design specification and implementation, advanced forms of data types, expressions and control primitives. Programming Reliable and Secure Software Seminar is designed to illustrate the problems and issues involved in developing reliable and secure software. It is an all-day seminar for practicing engineers that covers in-depth topics on how programs work and fail -- from the compilation system to memory management to interaction with the operating system and the external world. The emphasis is on debugging and code maintenace, after all those phases account for a significant portion of the software development process. Using Social Engineering to Design Secure Software. Tyler St. John, Ken Estes, and Michael W. Bigrigg. PACISE 21st Annual Conference, Indiana PA, April 8, 2006. The Quality of Compiler Messages and Code Integrity. Lidiya Ber and Michael W. Bigrigg. PACISE 21st Annual Conference, Indiana PA, April 8, 2006. (Superceeds CMU-04-09-03) An Evaluation of the Usefulness of Compiler Error
Messages. Michael W. Bigrigg, Russell Bortz, Shyamal
Chandra, Jared Sheehan, and Sara Smith. Carnegie Mellon
University Technical Report CMU-04-09-03, December 2003. Robustness Hinting for Improving End-to-End
Dependability. Michael W. Bigrigg. Second
Workshop on Evaluating and Architecting System Dependability
(EASY). In conjunction with ASPLOS-X, San Jose CA,
October 2002. The Set-Check-Use Methodology for Detecting Error
Propagation Failures in I/O Routines. Michael
W. Bigrigg, Jacob J. Vos. Workshop on Dependability
Benchmarking in conjunction with The International Conference
on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN-2002. Washington
DC, June 2002.
Testing the Portability of Desktop Applications to a
Networked Embedded System. Michael W. Bigrigg and
Joseph G. Slember. Workshop on Reliable Embedded Systems,
in conjunction with the 20th IEEE Symposium on Reliable
Distributed Systems, New Orleans, LA, October 28,
2001.
A Case for the Management of Graceful Degredation.
Michael W. Bigrigg. Carnegie Mellon University Technical
Report CMU-04-5-01. May 2001. RELATED PROJECTS 
Static Program Analysis for
Reliability
Dynamic Program Analysis for
Reliability
Program Analysis for Software Engineering
Michael Bigrigg Student Programmers,
Carnegie Mellon University Student Programmers,
Indiana University of Pennsylvania Student Programmers,
University of Pittsburgh
Paris was the hero who found Achilles heel and defeated him. In a similar way, our project seeks to find software's heel.
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