Range Fixes: Interactive Error Resolution for Software Configuration

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 or a very long fix list, difficult for the user to identify the desirable fix; 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 nine open source projects over two configuration platforms. The evaluation shows that our notion of range fix leads to mostly simple yet complete sets of fixes, and our algorithm is able to generate fixes within one second for configuration systems with a few thousands options and constraints.

Precise Condition Synthesis for Program Repair

“…Several approaches target at defect classes where the specification is complete, effectively avoiding the problem of weak test suites [11]. Typical defect classes include memory leaks [43], where the specification is semantically equivalent to the original program without leaks, concurrency bugs [44], [45], [46], where the specification is semantically equivalent to the original program without concurrency bugs, and configuration errors [47], where the specification can be interactively queried from the user. Though these approaches have a high precision, they target totally different defect classes compared with our work.…”

Proactive detection of inadequate diagnostic messages for software configuration errors

“…Software configuration errors (also known as misconfigurations) are errors in which the software code and the input are correct, but the software does not behave as desired because an incorrect value is used for a configuration option [55,60,62,67]. Such errors can manifest themselves as crashes, erroneous output, hangs, or silent failures.…”

Automatic Software Repair

“…Their approach is applicable to all structured documents with explicit static inconsistency rules. Along the same line, Xiong et al [191] detect and fix inconsistencies in MOF and UML models ; da Silva [162] use Prolog to propose a repair plan that fixes inconsistencies in UML models; Xiong et al [192] focuses on automatically repairing configuration errors in software product lines.…”