Generating Range Fixes for Software Configuration.

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Bibliographic Details
Title:	Generating Range Fixes for Software Configuration.
Authors:	Xiong, Yingfei¹ yingfei@gsd.uwaterloo.ca, Hubaux, Arnaud² ahu@info.fundp.ac.be, She, Steven¹ shshe@gsd.uwaterloo.ca, Czarnecki, Krzysztof¹ kczarnec@gsd.uwaterloo.ca
Source:	ICSE: International Conference on Software Engineering. Feb2012, p58-68. 11p.
Subjects:	Software configuration management, Computer software, Computer operating systems, Programming languages, Boolean functions
Abstract:	To prevent ill-formed configurations, highly configurable software often allows defining constraints over the available options. As these constraints can be complex, fixing a configuration that violates one or more constraints can be challenging. Although several fix-generation approaches exist, their applicability is limited because (1) they typically generate only one fix, failing to cover the solution that the user wants; and (2) they do not fully support non-Boolean constraints, which contain arithmetic, inequality, and string operators. This paper proposes a novel concept, range fix, for software configuration. A range fix specifies the options to change and the ranges of values for these options. We also design an algorithm that automatically generates range fixes for a violated constraint. We have evaluated our approach with three different strategies for handling constraint interactions, on data from five open source projects. Our evaluation shows that, even with the most complex strategy, our approach generates complete fix lists that are mostly short and concise, in a fraction of a second. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Database:	Engineering Source

Description
Abstract:	To prevent ill-formed configurations, highly configurable software often allows defining constraints over the available options. As these constraints can be complex, fixing a configuration that violates one or more constraints can be challenging. Although several fix-generation approaches exist, their applicability is limited because (1) they typically generate only one fix, failing to cover the solution that the user wants; and (2) they do not fully support non-Boolean constraints, which contain arithmetic, inequality, and string operators. This paper proposes a novel concept, range fix, for software configuration. A range fix specifies the options to change and the ranges of values for these options. We also design an algorithm that automatically generates range fixes for a violated constraint. We have evaluated our approach with three different strategies for handling constraint interactions, on data from five open source projects. Our evaluation shows that, even with the most complex strategy, our approach generates complete fix lists that are mostly short and concise, in a fraction of a second. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]