Target Selection for Test-Based Resource Adaptation

Abstract

Building software systems that adapt to changing resources is challenging: developers cannot anticipate all future situations that a software system may face, and even if they could, the effort required would be onerous. A conceptually simple, yet practically applicable, way to build resource adaptive software is to use test-based software minimization, where tests define functionality. One drawback of the approach is that it requires a time-consuming reduction process that removes program statements in order to reduce resource usage, making it impractical for use in deployed systems. We show that statements removed have predictable characteristics, making it possible to use heuristics to choose statements to analyze. We demonstrate the utility of our heuristics via a case study of the NetBeans IDE: using our best heuristic, we were able to compute an effective resource adaptation almost 3 times faster than without heuristic guidance.