# iGen: Dynamic Interaction Inference for Configurable Software

## TL;DR

iGen is a lightweight dynamic analysis tool that automatically infers detailed configuration interactions in software systems, reducing manual effort and improving understanding of configuration-to-code coverage mappings.

## Contribution

This paper introduces iGen, a novel iterative dynamic analysis technique for automatically discovering configuration interactions in software, which is more efficient and scalable than prior methods.

## Key findings

- iGen accurately infers interactions with few configurations
- iGen's results align with existing hypotheses about interaction structures
- The study covers 29 programs across five languages

## Abstract

To develop, analyze, and evolve today's highly configurable software systems, developers need deep knowledge of a system's configuration options, e.g., how options need to be set to reach certain locations, what configurations to use for testing, etc. Today, acquiring this detailed information requires manual effort that is difficult, expensive, and error prone. In this paper, we propose iGen, a novel, lightweight dynamic analysis technique that automatically discovers a program's \emph{interactions}---expressive logical formulae that give developers rich and detailed information about how a system's configuration option settings map to particular code coverage. iGen employs an iterative algorithm that runs a system under a small set of configurations, capturing coverage data; processes the coverage data to infer potential interactions; and then generates new configurations to further refine interactions in the next iteration. We evaluated iGen on 29 programs spanning five languages; the breadth of this study would be unachievable using prior interaction inference tools. Our results show that iGen finds precise interactions based on a very small fraction of the number of possible configurations. Moreover, iGen's results confirm several earlier hypotheses about typical interaction distributions and structures.