A Formal Approach to Error Localization and Correction in Service Compositions

Error detection, localization and correction are time-intensive tasks in software development, but crucial to deliver functionally correct products. Thus, automated approaches to these tasks have been intensively studied for standard software systems. For model-based software systems, the situation is different. While error detection is still well-studied, error localization and correction is a less-studied domain. In this paper, we examine error localization and correction for models of service compositions. Based on formal definitions of error and correction in this context, we show that the classical approach of error localization and correction, i.e. first determining a set of suspicious statements and then proposing changes to these statements, is ineffective in our context. In fact, it lessens the chance to succeed in finding a correction at all.In this paper, we introduce correction proposal as a novel approach on error correction in service compositions integrating error localization and correction in one combined step. In addition, we provide an algorithm to compute such correction proposals automatically.