Causality in Configurable Software Systems

Clemens Dubslaff, Kallistos Weis, Christel Baier, Sven Apel

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

14 Citations (Scopus)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2022
Pages325-337
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450392211
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

DBLP License: DBLP's bibliographic metadata records provided through http://dblp.org/ are distributed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Although the bibliographic metadata records are provided consistent with CC0 1.0 Dedication, the content described by the metadata records is not. Content may be subject to copyright, rights of privacy, rights of publicity and other restrictions.

Keywords

  • causality
  • configurable systems
  • software analysis
  • software product lines

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