Feature-interaction aware configuration prioritization

Abstract

Unexpected interactions among features induce most bugs in a configurable software system. Exhaustively analyzing all exponential number of possible configurations is prohibitively costly. Thus, various sampling methods have been proposed to systematically narrow down the exponential number of configurations to be tested. Since testing all selected configurations can require a huge amount of effort, fault-based configuration prioritization, that helps detect bugs earlier, can yield practical benefits in quality assurance. In this paper, we propose CoPo, a novel formulation of feature-interaction bugs via common program entities enabled/disabled by the features. Leveraging from that, we develop an efficient feature-interaction-aware configuration prioritization technique for configurable systems by ranking configurations according to their total number of potential bugs. We conducted several experiments to evaluate CoPo on a public benchmark. We found that CoPo outperforms the state-of-the-art configuration prioritization methods. Interestingly, it is able to detect 17 not-yet-discovered feature-interaction bugs.