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Mirage: Integrated Software Upgrade Deployment and Testing

Despite major advances in the engineering of maintainable and robust software over the years, upgrading software remains a primitive and error-prone activity.
This project is motivated by the claim that several problems with upgrading software are caused by a poor integration between upgrade development, deployment, and remote(user-site) testing.
To improve this integration, we present Mirage, a distributed framework for integrating upgrade deployment and remote testing into the overall upgrade development process.

Survey about software upgrades:

In 2007, we conducted an online survey about software upgrades. The purpose was to estimate the frequency of upgrades, the reasons for upgrading, the frequency of problems, and the classes of problems that occur with upgrades.

The original questionnaire for the online survey can be downloaded here.
The results of the survey are described and analyzed in our 2007 SOSP publication.
Raw data for the results of the survey are available upon simple request to olivier dot crameri at epfl dot ch.

We would like to thank everybody who volunteered to participate in the survey.

Publications:

Olivier Crameri, Nikola Knezevic, Dejan Kostic, Ricardo Bianchini, Willy Zwaenepoel.
Staged Deployment in Mirage, an Integrated Software Upgrade Testing and Distribution System.
In Proceedings of The 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) 2007 [detailed record] [pdf] [bibtex]

Student members:

Nikola Knezević
Olivier Crameri

Faculty members:

Dejan Kostic
Ricardo Bianchini
Willy Zwaenepoel

Joint work with:

Our research is partially supported by the Hasler Foundation (Switzerland) and the National Science Foundation (United States).