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ASE 2020
Mon 21 - Fri 25 September 2020 Melbourne, Australia
Wed 23 Sep 2020 16:20 - 16:40 at Koala - Configuration Management (2) Chair(s): Arie van Deursen

Understanding the influence of configuration options on performance is key for finding an optimal system configuration, system understanding, and performance debugging. In prior research, a number of performance influence modeling approaches have been proposed, which all assign scalar values to option influences and model predictions. However, these point estimates falsely imply a certainty regarding an option’s influence that neglects several sources of uncertainty within the assessment process, such as (1) measurement bias, (2) model representation and learning process, and (3) incomplete data. This leads to the situation that different approaches assign different scalar performance values to options and interactions among them. The true influence is uncertain, though, there is no way to even quantify this uncertainty with state-of-the-art performance modeling approaches.

We propose a novel approach based on probabilistic programming that explicitly models uncertainty for option influences and consequently provides a confidence interval for each prediction alongside a scalar. This way, we can explain, for the first time, why predictions may cause errors and which option’s influences may be unreliable. Our evaluation on 10 real-world subject systems shows that with our implementation, P4, we yield errors that match the state of the art when considering only the scalar component of the prediction, and we achieve competitive accuracies while providing reliable confidence intervals.

Wed 23 Sep

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16:00 - 17:00
Configuration Management (2)Research Papers at Koala
Chair(s): Arie van Deursen Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
16:00
20m
Talk
Inferring and Applying Def-Use Like Configuration Couplings in Deployment Descriptors
Research Papers
Chengyuan Wen Virginia Tech, Yaxuan Zhang Virginia Tech, Xiao He University of Science and Technology Beijing, China, Na Meng Virginia Tech
16:20
20m
Talk
Mastering Uncertainty in Performance Estimations of Configurable Software Systems
Research Papers
Johannes Dorn Leipzig University, Sven Apel Saarland University, Germany, Norbert Siegmund Leipzig University
DOI Pre-print
16:40
20m
Talk
Team Discussions and Dynamics During DevOps Tool Adoptions in OSS ProjectsACM Distinguished Paper
Research Papers
Likang Yin University of California, Davis, Vladimir Filkov University of California at Davis, USA