Using feature locality

Abstract

Despite the best efforts of software engineers, faults still escape into deployed software. Developers need time to prepare and distribute fixes, and in the interim deployments must either tolerate or avoid failures. Self-adaptive systems, systems that adapt to meet changing requirements in a dynamic environment, have a daunting task if their reconfiguration involves adding or removing functional features, because configurable software is known to suffer from failures that appear only under certain feature combinations.