Computational study demonstrates finite structural approximation for semantic consistency in software systems, suggesting scalable foundations for semantic configuration tools.
A configuration management (CM) tool is supposed to build a consistent software system following incremental changes to the system. The notion of consistency usually is purely syntactic, having to do with the sorts of properties analyzed by compilers. Semantic consistency traditionally has been studied in the field of formal methods and has been considered an impractical goal for CM. Although the semantic CM problem is undecidable, it is possible to obtain a structural approximation of the semantic effects of a change in a finite number of steps. Our approximation technique is formalized in logic and is based on information-theoretic properties of programs. The method in its present form applies to many but not all software systems, and it is programming-language independent. To the best of our knowledge, the semantic CM problem has not been formalized previously in nonsemantic terms, and we believe that our simplified formulation offers the potential for considerably more powerful debugging and configuration management tools.
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Mark Moriconi (1989) studied this question.
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