FastFix · Monitoring Control for Remote Software Maintenance

FastFix will enable time- and cost-efficient maintenance and support services, by monitoring software applications, replicating execution failures, and automatically generating patches.Software maintenance and support services are key factors to customers' perception of software quality. Customers are more demanding about these services, while contribution of maintenance to products total cost of ownership should be reduced.Reducing maintenance costs is even more crucial for SME's. Their software products often cover specific niches. To take full advantage of this, SMEs must get access to global markets, what is usually hampered by the lack of an adequate on-site customer support.Software vendors need a system to remotely provide a high quality support service to their customers, improve user experience and facilitate corrective, preventive and adaptive maintenance – of both new and existing software products.FastFix results will include a platform and a set of open source tools to on-line monitoring of execution environments, gathering semantic information on application and user behaviour. This information is sent in real time to a support centre, taking special care on privacy and security issues. Using event correlation techniques, FastFix identifies failure symptoms, performance degradation or changes in user behaviour and allow for failure replication, patch generation and patch deployment, resulting in a self-healing software application.Main objectives are to develop (1) tools to gather context information on user and application, (2) a run-time with minimum impact on application performance, (3) a secure method to send this information to a centralized fault analysis platform, (4) a tool to detect software failures, undesirable execution trends and performance degradation, (5) a platform to replicate failure conditions within a virtual machine and (6) a tool to generate change strategies and necessary patches.