As IoT systems are given more responsibility and autonomy, they offer greater benefits, but also carry greater risks. We believe this trend invigorates an old challenge of software engineering: how to develop high-risk software-intensive systems safely and securely under market pressures? As a first step, we conducted a systematic analysis of recent IoT failures to identify engineering challenges. We collected and analyzed 22 news reports and studied the sources, impacts, and repair strategies of failures in IoT systems. We observed failure trends both within and across application domains. We also observed that failure themes have persisted over time. To alleviate these trends, we outline a research agenda toward a Failure-Aware Software Development Life Cycle for IoT development. We propose an encyclopedia of failures and an empirical basis for system postmortems, complemented by appropriate automated tools.

Dharun Anandayuvaraj

Purdue University

James C. Davis

Purdue University, USA

United States

Software metrics capture information about software development products and processes. These metrics support decision-making, e.g., in team management or dependency selection. However, existing metrics tools measure only a snapshot of a software project. Little attention has been given to enabling engineers to reason about metric trends over time—longitudinal metrics that give insight about process, not just product. In this work, we present PRIME (PRocess Internal MEtrics), a tool for computing and visualizing process metrics. The currently-supported metrics include productivity, issue density, issue spoilage, and bus factor. We illustrate the value of longitudinal data and conclude with a research agenda. The demo video can be found at https://youtu.be/YigEHy3_JCo. The source code can be found at https://github.com/SoftwareSystemsLaboratory/prime.

Nicholas Synovic

Loyola University Chicago

United States

Matt Hyatt

Loyola University Chicago

Rohan Sethi

Loyola University Chicago

Sohini Thota

Loyola University Chicago

Shilpika

University of California at Davis

Allan J. Miller

Loyola University Chicago

Wenxin Jiang

Purdue University

Emmanuel S. Amobi

Loyola University Chicago

Austin Pinderski

Duke University, Loyola University Chicago

Konstantin Läufer

Loyola University Chicago

United States

Nicholas J. Hayward

Loyola University Chicago

Neil Klingensmith

Loyola University Chicago

James C. Davis

Purdue University, USA

United States

George K. Thiruvathukal

Loyola University Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory