Additional material for our paper Dimensions of Software Configuration. You can find the pre-print of the paper here.
ESEC/FSE 2020 talk on our work
Please cite our paper when using the data set:
Norbert Siegmund, Nicolai Ruckel, and Janet Siegmund. Dimensions of Software Configuration. In Proceedings of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), ACM Press, 2020.
We interviewed 11 software developers from 9 different companies and domains in semi-structured interviews about the above mentioned aspects regarding configuration tasks and issues in their daily work. You can find the final version of the translated questionnaire here.
| ID | Experience | Role | Domains | Transcript |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I1 | 10 years | Consultant, Senior Developer | DevOps, Fullstack | Transcript (translation) |
| I2 | 14 years | Developer | Backend, Microservice | Transcript (translation) |
| I3 | 22 years | Developer, Software Architect | DevOps, Microservice | Transcript (translation) |
| I4 | 15 years | Developer, Test Engineer | Backend | Transcript (translation) |
| I5 | 11 years | Senior Developer | Backend, Microservice | Transcript (translation) |
| I6 | 7 years | Software Architect | Backend, Microservice | Transcript (translation) |
| I7 | 6 years | Team Lead | Fullstack | Transcript (translation) |
| I8 | 19 years | Cloud Foundation Architect | Backend | Transcript (translation) |
| I9 | 5 years | Developer | Backend | Transcript (translation) |
| I10 | 7 years | Consultant, Tester, Developer | Fullstack | Transcript (translation) |
| I11 | 20 years | Senior Software Engineer | Frontend | Transcript (translation) |
| Company | Domain | Employees |
|---|---|---|
| 4Soft | IT Consulting | 40 |
| Accenture | IT Consulting | >459,000 |
| codecentric AG | IT Consulting | >480 |
| Red Hat | Open-source Software | 12,600 |
| Regiocom | Business Process Outsourcing | 5,500 |
| REWE Digital | E-commerce | 330,000 |
| Salesforce | Cloud-based Software | 35,000 |
| Xceptance | Software Testing | 42 |
| E-commerce | <100 |
We placed 18 related papers of the domains of software product lines, testing, performance optimization, configuration errors, and configuration engineering into the context of our model.
Thorsten Berger, Daniela Lettner, Julia Rubin, Paul Grünbacher, Adeline Silva, Martin Becker, Marsha Chechik, and Krzysztof Czarnecki. 2015. What is a Feature?: A Qualitative Study of Features in Industrial Software Product Lines. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Product Lines (SPLC). ACM, 16–25.
Jörg Liebig, Sven Apel, Christian Lengauer, Christian Kästner, and Michael Schulze. 2010. An Analysis of the Variability in Forty Preprocessor-Based Soft- ware Product Lines. In Proc. Int. Conf. Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, 105–114.
Christian Kästner, Sven Apel, and Martin Kuhlemann. 2008. Granularity in Software Product Lines. In Proc. Int. Conf. Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, New York, 311–320. https://doi.org/10.1145/1368088.1368131
Alexander von Rhein, Jörg Liebig, Andreas Janker, Christian Kästner, and Sven Apel. 2018. Variability-Aware Static Analysis at Scale: An Empirical Study. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 27, 4 (2018), 1–33.
Thorsten Berger, Ralf Rublack, Divya Nair, Joanne M. Atlee, Martin Becker, Krzysztof Czarnecki, and Andrzej Wąsowski. 2013. A Survey of Variability Modeling in Industrial Practice. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-intensive Systems (VaMoS ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 7, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2430502.2430513
Daniela Rabiser, Herbert Prähofer, Paul Grünbacher, Michael Petruzelka, Klaus Eder, Florian Angerer, Mario Kromoser, and Andreas Grimmer. 2018. Multi-purpose, multi-level feature modeling of large-scale industrial software systems. Software & Systems Modeling 17, 3 (01 Jul 2018), 913–938. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-016-0564-7
Changhai Nie and Hareton Leung. 2011. A Survey of Combinatorial Testing. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 43, 2, Article 11 (Feb. 2011), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1883612.1883618
Dongpu Jin, Xiao Qu, Myra B. Cohen, and Brian Robinson. 2014. Configurations Everywhere: Implications for Testing and Debugging in Practice. In Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE Companion 2014). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 215–224. https://doi.org/10.1145/2591062.2591191
Michael Hilton, Timothy Tunnell, Kai Huang, Darko Marinov, and Danny Dig. 2016. Usage, Costs, and Benefits of Continuous Integration in Open-source Projects. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). ACM, 426–437.
Vivek Nair, Tim Menzies, Norbert Siegmund, and Sven Apel. 2017. Faster discovery of faster system configurations with spectral learning. Autom Softw Eng (Aug. 2017), 1–31.
Jeho Oh, Don Batory, Margaret Myers, and Norbert Siegmund. 2017. Finding Near-optimal Configurations in Product Lines by Random Sampling. In Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2017). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61–71.
Mohammed Sayagh, Noureddine Kerzazi, and Bram Adams. 2017. On Cross-stack Configuration Errors. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE Press, 255–265.
Zuoning Yin, Xiao Ma, Jing Zheng, Yuanyuan Zhou, Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, and Shankar Pasupathy. 2011. An Empirical Study on Configuration Errors in Commercial and Open Source Systems. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). ACM, 159–172.
Tianyin Xu and Yuanyuan Zhou. 2015. Systems Approaches to Tackling Configuration Errors: A Survey. ACM Comput. Surv. 47, 4, Article 70 (2015), 41 pages.
M. Sayagh, N. Kerzazi, B. Adams, and F. Petrillo. 2018. Software Configuration Engineering in Practice: Interviews, Survey, and Systematic Literature Review. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2018).
Tianyin Xu and Darko Marinov. 2018. Mining Container Image Repositories for Software Configuration and Beyond. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER). ACM, 49–52.
Jens Smeds, Kristian Nybom, and Ivan Porres. 2015. DevOps: A Definition and Perceived Adoption Impediments. In Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, Casper Lassenius, Torgeir Dingsøyr, and Maria Paasivaara (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 166–177.
Mali Senapathi, Jim Buchan, and Hady Osman. 2018. DevOps Capabilities, Prac- tices, and Challenges: Insights from a Case Study. In Proceedings of the Interna- tional Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE). ACM, 57–67.