Using symbolic evaluation to understand behavior in configurable software systems

Many modern software systems are designed to be highly configurable, which increases flexibility but can make programs hard to test, analyze, and understand. We present an initial empirical study of how configuration options affect program behavior. We conjecture that, at certain levels of abstracti...

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Veröffentlicht in:2010 ACM/IEEE 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering Jg. 1; S. 445 - 454
Hauptverfasser: Reisner, Elnatan, Song, Charles, Ma, Kin-Keung, Foster, Jeffrey S., Porter, Adam
Format: Tagungsbericht
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.05.2010
IEEE
Schriftenreihe:ACM Conferences
Schlagworte:
Computing methodologies > Symbolic and algebraic manipulation
Concrete
empirical software engineering
Libraries
Measurement
Servers
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis > Software testing and debugging
software configurations
Software systems
software testing and analysis
Testing
Theory of computation > Models of computation > Abstract machines
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Abstraction
software configurations
empirical software engineering
software testing and analysis
ISBN:9781605587196, 1605587192
ISSN:0270-5257
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:Many modern software systems are designed to be highly configurable, which increases flexibility but can make programs hard to test, analyze, and understand. We present an initial empirical study of how configuration options affect program behavior. We conjecture that, at certain levels of abstraction, configuration spaces are far smaller than the worst case, in which every configuration is distinct. We evaluated our conjecture by studying three configurable software systems: vsftpd, ngIRCd, and grep. We used symbolic evaluation to discover how the settings of run-time configuration options affect line, basic block, edge, and condition coverage for our subjects under a given test suite. Our results strongly suggest that for these subject programs, test suites, and configuration options, when abstracted in terms of the four coverage criteria above, configuration spaces are in fact much smaller than combinatorics would suggest and are effectively the composition of many small, self-contained groupings of options.
ISBN:9781605587196
1605587192
ISSN:0270-5257
DOI:10.1145/1806799.1806864