research-article

Static extraction of program configuration options

Authors:

Randy KatzAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 131 - 140

https://doi.org/10.1145/1985793.1985812

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Many programs use a key-value model for configuration options. We examined how this model is used in seven open source Java projects totaling over a million lines of code. We present a static analysis that extracts a list of configuration options for a program. Our analysis finds 95% of the options read by the programs in our sample, making it more complete than existing documentation.

Most configuration options we saw fall into a small number of types. A dozen types cover 90% of options. We present a second analysis that exploits this fact, inferring a type for most options. Together, these analyses enable more visibility into program configuration, helping reduce the burden of configuration documentation and configuration debugging.

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Cited By

Li SGao HChen WLi YTian HLiu CYe D(2025)Characterizing and detecting Python version incompatibilities caused by inconsistent version specificationsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2025.112337222(112337)Online publication date: Apr-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2025.112337
Wang SLian XLi QMarinov DXu Td'Amorim M(2024)Ctest4J: A Practical Configuration Testing Framework for JavaCompanion Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3663529.3663799(562-566)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663529.3663799
Shan SHuo YSu YLi YLi DZheng ZChristakis MPradel M(2024)Face It Yourselves: An LLM-Based Two-Stage Strategy to Localize Configuration Errors via LogsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3652106(13-25)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
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Index Terms

Static extraction of program configuration options
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Reusability
    2. Software post-development issues
      1. Documentation

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2011

1258 pages

ISBN:9781450304450

DOI:10.1145/1985793

General Chair:
Richard N. Taylor
UC Irvine, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Harald Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland
,
Nenad Medvidović
University of Southern California, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 May 2011

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ICSE11

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SIGSOFT

ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 21 - 28, 2011

HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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Cited By

Li SGao HChen WLi YTian HLiu CYe D(2025)Characterizing and detecting Python version incompatibilities caused by inconsistent version specificationsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2025.112337222(112337)Online publication date: Apr-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2025.112337
Wang SLian XLi QMarinov DXu Td'Amorim M(2024)Ctest4J: A Practical Configuration Testing Framework for JavaCompanion Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3663529.3663799(562-566)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663529.3663799
Shan SHuo YSu YLi YLi DZheng ZChristakis MPradel M(2024)Face It Yourselves: An LLM-Based Two-Stage Strategy to Localize Configuration Errors via LogsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3652106(13-25)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3652106
Nasiri RKumara ITamburri Dvan den Heuvel W(2024)Towards a Taxonomy of Infrastructure as Code Misconfigurations: An Ansible StudyService-Oriented Computing10.1007/978-3-031-72578-4_5(83-103)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72578-4_5
Chen ZChen PWang PYu GHe ZMai GChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)DiagConfig: Configuration Diagnosis of Performance Violations in Configurable Software SystemsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616300(566-578)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
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Somashekar GKumar RVieira MCardellini VDi Marco ATuma P(2023)Enhancing the Configuration Tuning Pipeline of Large-Scale Distributed Applications Using Large Language Models (Idea Paper)Companion of the 2023 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering10.1145/3578245.3585032(39-44)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2023
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