Practitioners widely recognize the importance of event logging for a variety of tasks, such as accounting, system measurements and troubleshooting. Nevertheless, in spite of the importance of the tasks based on the logs collected under real workload conditions, event logging lacks systematic design and implementation practices. The implementation of the logging mechanism strongly relies on the human expertise. This paper proposes a measurement study of event logging practices in a critical industrial domain. We assess a software development process at Selex ES, a leading Finmeccanica company in electronic and information solutions for critical systems. Our study combines source code analysis, inspection of around 2.3 millions log entries, and direct feedback from the development team to gain process-wide insights ranging from programming practices, logging objectives and issues impacting log analysis. The findings of our study were extremely valuable to prioritize event logging reengineering tasks at Selex ES.

The practice of defect analysis is recognized as an essential task for software process measurement, yet its effective application in the industrial development of large-scale software systems raises several challenges. We report the results of a study conducted at SELEX ES – a large system integrator leader in the market of software-intensive mission-critical systems. The article describes the defect analysis approach that we tailored to evaluate the software development process with respect to the quality of produced software and its relation with the required effort. Three key phases of the process were addressed, regarding the software implementation, the testing phase and the prerelease defect fixing activity, over a set of six computer software configuration items developed from 2009 to 2012 for the naval and maritime domain product line. The analysis highlighted efficiency bottlenecks in each of the monitored phases, providing company engineers with insights about room for process improvement. The implemented approach, the observed phenomena and the inferred conclusions are of support to practitioners coping with systems, development models and industrial environments similar to the considered one. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cloud Computing has risen a great interest over the last years as it represents an enabling technology for flexible and ubiquitous access over the network to a set of shared computing resources. This work comes from an industrial experience aiming at exploiting the cloud potential for virtualizing complex infrastructures such as an entire Air Traffic Center (ATC), a clear example of complex SoS (System of Systems). The use of virtualization is convenient because industry can leverage in-house test-beds to perform distributed testing campaigns in pre-operational phases or to design new automatic fail-over mechanisms for fully distributed systems. In order to realize such mitigation and recovery techniques in the ATC field, indeed, a cloud platform is required to guarantee a low VM provisioning time with the objective of minimizing the service disruption. In this perspective, after having introduced the principal concepts and factors of the provisioning time, we propose a deep analysis and comparison for two different Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms, namely Open Stack and Open Nebula (using KVM as hypervisor), that were selected through a preliminary scouting phase.

The SESAR ATM Security Risk Assessment Methodology (SecRAM) aims at providing a methodology to be applied by the SESAR Operational Focus Areas (OFAs). To give effectiveness to the evaluation of SecRAM, Air Traffic Management (ATM) operative scenarios are greatly required. In this paper we leverage a Cloud-based approach to build up a virtualized replica of a real Air Control Centre (ACC) in order to realize a vulnerability analysis and to find some possible points of attacks. Then we applied the SecRAM methodology on our test-bed and we built a real threat scenario for which a risk treatment is properly designed.

Mandelbugs are faults that are triggered by complex conditions, such as interaction with hardware and other software, and timing or ordering of events. These faults are considerably difficult to detect with traditional testing techniques, since it can be challenging to control their complex triggering conditions in a testing environment. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt specific verification and/or fault-tolerance strategies for dealing with them in a cost-effective way. In this paper, we investigate how to predict the location of Mandelbugs in complex software systems, in order to focus V&V activities and fault tolerance mechanisms in those modules where Mandelbugs are most likely present. In the context of an industrial complex software system, we empirically analyze Mandelbugs, and investigate an approach for Mandelbug prediction based on a set of novel software complexity metrics. Results show that Mandelbugs account for a noticeable share of faults, and that the proposed approach can predict Mandelbug-prone modules with greater accuracy than the sole adoption of traditional software metrics.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted growing interest in the last decade as an infrastructure to support a diversity of ubiquitous computing and cyber-physical systems. However, most research work has focused on protocols or on specific applications. As a result, there remains a clear lack of effective, feasible and usable system architectures that address both functional and non-functional requirements in an integrated fashion. In this paper, we outline the EMMON system architecture for large-scale, dense, real-time embedded monitoring. EMMON provides a hierarchical communication architecture together with integrated middleware and command and control software. It has been designed to use standard commercially-available technologies, while maintaining as much flexibility as possible to meet specific applications requirements. The EMMON architecture has been validated through extensive simulation and experimental evaluation, including a 300+ node test-bed, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest single-site WSN test-bed in Europe to date.

Most research work on WSNs has focused on protocols or on specific applications. There is a clear lack of easy/ready-to-use WSN technologies and tools for planning, implementing, testing and commissioning WSN systems in an integrated fashion. While there exists a plethora of papers about network planning and deployment methodologies, to the best of our knowledge none of them helps the designer to match coverage requirements with network performance evaluation. In this paper we aim at filling this gap by presenting an unified toolset, i.e., a framework able to provide a global picture of the system, from the network deployment planning to system test and validation. This toolset has been designed to back up the EMMON WSN system architecture for large-scale, dense, real-time embedded monitoring. It includes network deployment planning, worst-case analysis and dimensioning, protocol simulation and automatic remote programming and hardware testing tools. This toolset has been paramount to validate the system architecture through DEMMON1, the first EMMON demonstrator, i.e., a 300+ node test-bed, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest single-site WSN test-bed in Europe to date.

The next generation of critical systems requires an efficient, scalable and robust data dissemination infrastructure. Middleware solutions compliant with the novel OMG standard, called Data Distribution Service (DDS), are being traditionally used for architecting large-scale systems, because they well meet the requirements of scalability, seamless decoupling and fault tolerance. Due to such features, industrial practitioners are enforcing the adoption of such middleware solutions also within the context of critical systems. However, these systems pose serious dependability requirements, which in turn demand DDS compliant products also to realize reliable data dissemination in different and heterogeneous contexts. Hence, assessing the supported reliability degree and proposing improvement strategies becomes crucial and requires a clear understanding of DDS compliant middleware failing behavior. This paper illustrates an innovative tool to automatically evaluate the robustness of DDS-compliant middleware based on a fault injection technique. Specifically, experiments have been conducted on an actual implementation of the DDS standard, by means of injecting a set of proper invalid inputs through its API and analyzing the achieved outcomes.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted growing interest in the last decade as an infrastructure to support a diversity of ubiquitous computing and cyber-physical systems. However, most research work has focused on protocols or on specific applications. As a result, there remains a clear lack of effective and usable WSN system architectures that address both functional and non-functional requirements in an integrated fashion. This poster outlines the EMMON system architecture for large-scale, dense, real-time embedded monitoring. It provides a hierarchical communication architecture together with integrated middleware and command and control software. It has been designed to maintain as much as flexibility as possible while meeting specific applications requirements. EMMON has been validated through extensive analytical, simulation and experimental evaluations, including through a 300+ nodes test-bed the largest single-site WSN test-bed in Europe.

This work presents a measurement-based dependability evaluation of the Bluetooth data communication channel, i.e., the Baseband layer. The main contribution is the definition of the Baseband's error/recovery model according to the Markov chains formalism. The model is derived by analyzing field data, which are collected via a commercial air sniffer deployed over real- world Bluetooth piconets. The model is parametric and actual values for its parameters are estimated by analyzing the field data. The paper also proposes the evaluation of dependability statistics (e.g., the error and failure times distributions, and the availability estimate), and the study of the failing behavior of the Bluetooth communication channel under Wi-Fi interferences.