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Abstract

Many approaches for testing configurable software systems start from the same assumption: it is impossible to test all configurations. This motivated the definition of variability-aware abstractions and sampling techniques to cope with large configuration spaces. Yet, there is no theoretical barrier that prevents the exhaustive testing of all configurations by simply enumerating them, if the effort required to do so remains acceptable. Not only this: we believe there is lots to be learned by systematically and exhaustively testing a configurable system. In this case study, we report on the first ever endeavour to test all possible configurations of an industry-strength, open source configurable software system, JHipster, a popular code generator for web applications. We built a testing scaffold for the 26,000+ configurations of JHipster using a cluster of 80 machines during 4 nights for a total of 4,376 hours (182 days) CPU time. We find that 35.70% configurations fail and we identify the feature interactions that cause the errors. We show that sampling strategies (like dissimilarity and 2-wise): (1) are more effective to find faults than the 12 default configurations used in the JHipster continuous integration; (2) can be too costly and exceed the available testing budget. We cross this quantitative analysis with the qualitative assessment of JHipster's lead developers.

Details

1009240
Title
Test them all, is it worth it? Assessing configuration sampling on the JHipster Web development stack
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2018
Publication date
Jun 11, 2018
Section
Computer Science
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2018-06-18
Milestone dates
2017-10-22 (Submission v1); 2018-03-15 (Submission v2); 2018-06-11 (Submission v3)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
18 Jun 2018
ProQuest document ID
2073899809
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/test-them-all-is-worth-assessing-configuration/docview/2073899809/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2018. This work is published under http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2020-10-21
Database
ProQuest One Academic