Title
Uniform and scalable sampling of highly configurable systems
Abstract
Many analyses on configurable software systems are intractable when confronted with colossal and highly-constrained configuration spaces. These analyses could instead use statistical inference, where a tractable sample accurately predicts results for the entire space. To do so, the laws of statistical inference requires each member of the population to be equally likely to be included in the sample, i.e., the sampling process needs to be "uniform". SAT-samplers have been developed to generate uniform random samples at a reasonable computational cost. However, there is a lack of experimental validation over colossal spaces to show whether the samplers indeed produce uniform samples or not. This paper (i) proposes a new sampler named BDDSampler, (ii) presents a new statistical test to verify sampler uniformity, and (iii) reports the evaluation of BDDSampler and five other state-of-the-art samplers: KUS, QuickSampler, Smarch, Spur, and Unigen2. Our experimental results show only BDDSampler satisfies both scalability and uniformity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s10664-021-10102-5
EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Uniform sampling, Configurable systems, Software product lines, Binary decision diagrams, SAT-solvers
Journal
27
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1382-3256
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ruben Heradio100.34
David Fernandez-Amoros200.34
Jose A. Galindo300.34
David Benavides443630.52
Don S. Batory556041237.66