Evaluating Interaction Patterns in Configurable Software Systems
Evaluating Interaction Patterns in Configurable Software Systems
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Date
2009-06-16
Authors
Reisner, Elnatan
Song, Charles
Ma, Kin-Keung
Foster, Jeffrey S.
Porter, Adam
Advisor
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Abstract
Many modern software systems are designed to be highly configurable,
which makes testing them a challenge. One popular approach is
combinatorial configuration testing, which, given an interaction
strength $t$, computes a set of configurations to test such that all $t
$-way combinations of option settings appear at least once. Basically,
this approach assumes that interactions are complete in the sense that
any combination of $t$ options can interact and therefore must be
tested. We conjecture, however, that in practical systems interactions
are limited. If our conjecture is true, then new techniques might be
developed to identify or approximate infeasible interactions, greatly
reducing the number of configurations that must be tested. We evaluated
this conjecture with an initial empirical study of several configurable
software systems. In this study we used symbolic evaluation to analyze
how the settings of run-time configuration options affected a test
suite's line coverage. Our results strongly suggest that for these
subject programs, test suites and configuration options, at least at the
level of line coverage, interactions between configuration options are
not complete.