Client-Specific Equivalence Checking

Federico Mora, Yi Li, Julia Rubin, and Marsha Chechik

In Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2018

Abstract: Software is often built by integrating components created by different teams or even different organizations. With little understanding of changes in dependent components, it is challenging to maintain correctness and robustness of the entire system. In this paper, we investigate the effect of component changes on the behavior of their clients. We observe that changes in a component are often irrelevant to a particular client and thus can be adopted without any delays or negative effects. Following this observation, we formulate the notion of client-specific equivalence checking (CSE) and develop an automated technique optimized for checking such equivalence. We evaluate our technique on a set of benchmarks, including those from the existing literature on equivalence checking, and show its applicability and effectiveness.

Cite:

@inproceedings{Mora2018CSE,
  author = {Mora, Federico and Li, Yi and Rubin, Julia and Chechik, Marsha},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)},
  month = sep,
  pages = {441--451},
  publisher = {ACM},
  title = {Client-Specific Equivalence Checking},
  year = {2018}
}