A Quantitative Cost/Benefit Analysis for Dynamic Updating

By: Bashar Gharaibeh, Hridesh Rajan, and J. Morris Chang

Abstract

Dynamic software updating provides many benefits, e.g. in runtime monitoring, runtime adaptation to fix bugs in long running applications, etc. Although it has several advantages, no quantitative analysis of its costs and revenue are available to show its benefits or limitations especially in comparison with other software updating schemes. To address this limitation in evaluating software updating schemes, we contribute a quantitative cost/benefit analysis based on net option-value model, which stems from the analysis of financial options. Our model expresses the relation between added value and paid cost in mathematical forms. We have used this model to evaluate the revenue from dynamic updating in two case studies featuring Xerces and MobileMedia. These studies reveal the set of parameter values that render dynamic updating effective. We also compared two previously published dynamic updating schemes and observed how the perceived performance and coverage of different updating systems affects their relative gain.

ACM Reference

Gharaibeh, B. et al. 2009. A quantitative cost/benefit analysis for dynamic updating. Technical Report #09-27. Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science.

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{gharaibeh2009quantitative,
  title = {A quantitative cost/benefit analysis for dynamic updating},
  author = {Gharaibeh, Bashar and Rajan, Hridesh and Chang, J Morris},
  year = {2009},
  month = {September},
  institution = {Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science},
  number = {09-27},
  abstract = {
    Dynamic software updating provides many benefits, e.g. in runtime monitoring,
    runtime adaptation to fix bugs in long running applications, etc. Although it
    has several advantages, no quantitative analysis of its costs and revenue are
    available to show its benefits or limitations especially in comparison with
    other software updating schemes. To address this limitation in evaluating
    software updating schemes, we contribute a quantitative cost/benefit analysis
    based on net option-value model, which stems from the analysis of financial
    options. Our model expresses the relation between added value and paid cost in
    mathematical forms. We have used this model to evaluate the revenue from
    dynamic updating in two case studies featuring Xerces and MobileMedia. These
    studies reveal the set of parameter values that render dynamic updating
    effective. We also compared two previously published dynamic updating schemes
    and observed how the perceived performance and coverage of different updating
    systems affects their relative gain.
  }
}