2.5 Maintainability

A software product must be maintainable. This is, again, a very broad statement, but a testing framework can help with the task. Once a model has been developed, validated and verified, we can repeatedly execute the suite of tests for the entire system to ensure that it remains valid and verified over its lifetime.

When a feature stops functioning as intended after some kind of change to the system is integrated, it is called generically a regression. Originally the term regression referred to a change that caused a previously fixed bug to reappear, but the term has evolved to describe any kind of change that breaks existing functionality. There are many kinds of regressions that may occur in practice.

A local regression is one in which a change affects the changed component directly. For example, if a component is modified to allocate and free memory but stale pointers are used, the component itself fails.

A remote regression is one in which a change to one component breaks functionality in another component. This reflects violation of an implied but possibly unrecognized contract between components.

An unmasked regression is one that creates a situation where a previously existing bug that had no affect is suddenly exposed in the system. This may be as simple as exercising a code path for the first time.

A performance regression is one that causes the performance requirements of the system to be violated. For example, doing some work in a low level function that may be repeated large numbers of times may suddenly render the system unusable from certain perspectives.

The ns-3 testing framework provides tools for automating the process used to validate and verify the code in nightly test suites to help quickly identify possible regressions.

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