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ICSE 2021
Mon 17 May - Sat 5 June 2021

Many techniques were proposed for detecting soft- ware misconfigurations and diagnosing unintended behavior caused by misconfigurations in cloud systems. Detection and diagnosis are steps in the right direction: misconfigurations cause many costly failures and severe performance issues. But we argue that continued focus on detection and diagnosis is symptomatic of a more serious problem: configuration design and implementation are not first-class software engineering endeavors in cloud systems. Little is known about how and why developers of these systems evolve software configuration design and implementation, and the challenges that they face in doing so.

We present a source-code level study of the evolution of software configuration design and implementation in cloud systems. Our goal is to understand the rationale and developer practices for revising initial software configuration design and implementation decisions, especially in response to consequences of misconfigurations. To this end, we studied 1178 configuration-related commits from a recent 2.5 year version-control history of four large-scale, mature, and actively-maintained open-source cloud systems (HDFS, HBase, Spark, and Cassandra). We derive several new insights into the software configuration engineering process. Our results motivate new techniques for proactively reducing misconfigurations by improving the configuration design and implementation process in cloud systems. We highlight a number of future research directions.

Slides (icse2021.pptx)1.56MiB

Wed 26 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

12:55 - 13:55
2.2.2. Configuration of Software Systems: TestingTechnical Track / SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice at Blended Sessions Room 2 +12h
Chair(s): Antonia Bertolino CNR-ISTI
12:55
20m
Paper
An Evolutionary Study of Configuration Design and Implementation in Cloud SystemsArtifact ReusableTechnical Track
Technical Track
Yuanliang Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Haochen He National University of Defense Technology, Owolabi Legunsen Cornell University, Shanshan Li National University of Defense Technology, Wei Dong National University of Defense Technology, Tianyin Xu University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
13:15
20m
Paper
AutoCCAG: An Automated Approach to Constrained Covering Array GenerationTechnical Track
Technical Track
Chuan Luo Microsoft Research, China, Jinkun Lin State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Shaowei Cai Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Xin Chen Microsoft Research, China, Bing He Microsoft Research, China, Bo Qiao Microsoft Research, Beijing, China, Pu Zhao Microsoft Research, Beijing, China, Qingwei Lin Microsoft Research, Beijing, China, Hongyu Zhang The University of Newcastle, Wei Wu L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, Saravanakumar Rajmohan Microsoft Office, United States, Dongmei Zhang Microsoft Research
Pre-print Media Attached
13:35
20m
Paper
ConfigFix: Interactive Configuration Conflict Resolution for the Linux KernelSEIP
SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice
Patrick Franz Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Thorsten Berger Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Ibrahim Fayaz VecScan AB (Vector Sweden), Sarah Nadi University of Alberta, Evgeny Groshev Chalmers | University of Gothenburg
Pre-print Media Attached

Thu 27 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

00:55 - 01:55
2.2.2. Configuration of Software Systems: TestingSEIP - Software Engineering in Practice / Technical Track at Blended Sessions Room 2
00:55
20m
Paper
An Evolutionary Study of Configuration Design and Implementation in Cloud SystemsArtifact ReusableTechnical Track
Technical Track
Yuanliang Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Haochen He National University of Defense Technology, Owolabi Legunsen Cornell University, Shanshan Li National University of Defense Technology, Wei Dong National University of Defense Technology, Tianyin Xu University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
01:15
20m
Paper
AutoCCAG: An Automated Approach to Constrained Covering Array GenerationTechnical Track
Technical Track
Chuan Luo Microsoft Research, China, Jinkun Lin State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Shaowei Cai Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Xin Chen Microsoft Research, China, Bing He Microsoft Research, China, Bo Qiao Microsoft Research, Beijing, China, Pu Zhao Microsoft Research, Beijing, China, Qingwei Lin Microsoft Research, Beijing, China, Hongyu Zhang The University of Newcastle, Wei Wu L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, Saravanakumar Rajmohan Microsoft Office, United States, Dongmei Zhang Microsoft Research
Pre-print Media Attached
01:35
20m
Paper
ConfigFix: Interactive Configuration Conflict Resolution for the Linux KernelSEIP
SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice
Patrick Franz Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Thorsten Berger Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Ibrahim Fayaz VecScan AB (Vector Sweden), Sarah Nadi University of Alberta, Evgeny Groshev Chalmers | University of Gothenburg
Pre-print Media Attached