Causality in configurable software systems
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Detecting and understanding reasons for defects and inadvertent behavior in software is challenging due to their increasing complexity. In configurable software systems, the combinatorics that arises from the multitude of features a user might select from adds a further layer of complexity. We introduce the notion of feature causality, which is based on counterfactual reasoning and inspired by the seminal definition of actual causality by Halpern and Pearl. Feature causality operates at the level of system configurations and is capable of identifying features and their interactions that are the reason for emerging functional and non-functional properties. We present various methods to explicate these reasons, in particular well-established notions of responsibility and blame that we extend to the feature-oriented setting. Establishing a close connection of feature causality to prime implicants, we provide algorithms to effectively compute feature causes and causal explications. By means of an evaluation on a wide range of configurable software systems, including community benchmarks and real-world systems, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach: We illustrate how our notion of causality facilitates to identify root causes, estimate the effects of features, and detect feature interactions.
Details
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings - 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2022 |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York |
Pages | 325-337 |
Number of pages | 13 |
ISBN (electronic) | 9781450392211 |
ISBN (print) | 978-1-4503-9221-1 |
Publication status | Published - 5 Jul 2022 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Conference
Title | International Conference on Software Engineering |
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Abbreviated title | ICSE'2022 |
Conference number | |
Duration | 8 - 27 May 2022 |
Website | |
Degree of recognition | International event |
Location | |
City | Pittsburgh |
Country | United States of America |
External IDs
Scopus | 85133510076 |
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Mendeley | 53ca13c6-4b19-360f-b399-839effcb1272 |
ORCID | /0000-0002-5321-9343/work/142236778 |
Keywords
Research priority areas of TU Dresden
DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards
Subject groups, research areas, subject areas according to Destatis
Keywords
- causality, configurable systems, software analysis, software product lines