Uniform Sampling of SAT Solutions for Configurable Systems: Are We There Yet?

Quentin Plazar, Mathieu Acher, Gilles Perrouin, Xavier Devroey, Maxime Cordy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

43 Citations (Scopus)
252 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Uniform or near-uniform generation of solutions for large satisfiability formulas is a problem of theoretical and practical interest for the testing community. Recent works proposed two algorithms (namely UniGen and QuickSampler) for reaching a good compromise between execution time and uniformity guarantees, with empirical evidence on SAT benchmarks. In the context of highly-configurable software systems (e.g., Linux), it is unclear whether UniGen and QuickSampler can scale and sample uniform software configurations. In this paper, we perform a thorough experiment on 128 real-world feature models. We find that UniGen is unable to produce SAT solutions out of such feature models. Furthermore, we show that QuickSampler does not generate uniform samples and that some features are either never part of the sample or too frequently present. Finally, using a case study, we characterize the impacts of these results on the ability to find bugs in a configurable system. Overall, our results suggest that we are not there: more research is needed to explore the cost-effectiveness of uniform sampling when testing large configurable systems.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE 12th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2019
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings
EditorsL. O'Conner
Place of PublicationPiscataway, NJ
PublisherIEEE
Pages240-251
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781728117355
ISBN (Print)978-1-7281-1737-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
EventICST 2019 : 2019 IEEE 12th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation - Xi'an, China
Duration: 22 Apr 201927 Apr 2019
Conference number: 12th

Conference

ConferenceICST 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityXi'an
Period22/04/1927/04/19

Bibliographical note

Accepted author manuscript

Keywords

  • Configurable-systems
  • SAT
  • Software-product-lines
  • Software-testing
  • Uniform-sampling
  • Variability-modeling

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