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Reverse Engineering Distributed Algorithms.

Authors :
Sere, K.
Walden, M.
Source :
Journal of Software Maintenance: Research & Practice; Mar-Apr96, Vol. 8 Issue 2, p117-144, 28p
Publication Year :
1996

Abstract

Distributed systems are difficult for a human being to comprehend. Informal reasoning about the many parallel and decentralized activities in these systems Is not trustworthy. Therefore formal tools for construction and maintenance of distributed systems are needed. We Introduce a formal approach to reverse engineering distributed systems that is based on a technique we call coarsement. The idea is that an Implementation is stepwise turned into a high level specification through a number of Intermediate coarsement steps that preserve the basic functionality of the implementation. The method gives structure to a distributed algorithm that can now be seen as consisting of a number of layers interacting with each other. Each coarsement step produces one such layer. Furthermore, after the coarsement steps the algorithm is easier to understand and to reason about than the original one due to this layering. We show the practical feasibility of the coarsement approach to reverse engineering by analysing a non-trivial distributed algorithm that maintains the routeing information for message passing among a set of processing nodes in a distributed network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
1040550X
Volume :
8
Issue :
2
Database :
Complementary Index
Journal :
Journal of Software Maintenance: Research & Practice
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
15038546
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1096-908X(199603)8:2<117::AID-SMR126>3.0.CO;2-I