Towards assuring non-recurrence of faults leading to transaction outages

Agrawal, A.; Naik, Ravindra

doi:10.1145/1953355.1953370

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In COBOL, additionally, the jump to a Paragraph because of a GOTO results in a fall-through of control to the subsequent Paragraph, leading to potentially incomprehensible behaviour. Agrawal et al in their paper [9] have presented a statistic that about 50% of the transaction outages are caused by undesirable GOTOs in the program. Such undesired GOTOs are the reason behind the unintended fall-throughs in the code.…”

Section: A Removal Of Bad Code Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Precise detection of un-initialized variables in large, real-life COBOL programs in presence of unrealizable paths

Jiresal¹,

Contractor²,

Naik³

2011

2011 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM)

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Using variables before assigning any values to them are known to result in critical failures in an application. Few compilers warn about the use of some, but not all uses of un-initialized variables. The problem persists, especially in COBOL systems, due to lack of reliable program analysis tools. A critical reason is the presence of large number of control flow paths due to the use of un-structured constructs of the language.We present the problems faced by one of our big clients in his large, COBOL based software system due to the use of un-initialized variables. Using static data and control-flow analysis to detect them, we observed large number of false positives (imprecision) introduced due to the unrealizable paths in the un-structured COBOL code. We propose a solution to address the realizability issue. The solution is based on the summary based function analysis, which is adapted for COBOL Paragraphs and Sections, to handle the perform-through and fall-through control-flow, and is significantly engineered to scale for large programs (single COBOL program extending to tens of thousands of lines). Using this technique, we noted very large reduction, 45% on an average, in the number of false positives for the un-initialized variables.

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Section: A Removal Of Bad Code Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We run the tool [9] developed by Agrawal et al on the large industrial programs, and fix the potential defects reported by the tool. These include removal of out-of-range GOTOs, unintended fall-throughs and dead paragraphs in the code.…”

Section: A Removal Of Bad Code Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%