Presence-Condition Simplification in Highly Configurable Systems

For the analysis of highly configurable systems, analysis approaches need to take the inherent variability of these systems into account. The notion of presence conditions is central to such approaches. A presence condition specifies a subset of system configurations in which a certain artifact or a concern of interest is present (e.g., a defect associated with this subset). In this paper, we introduce and analyze the problem of presence-condition simplification. A key observation is that presence conditions often contain redundant information, which can be safely removed in the interest of simplicity and efficiency. We present a formalization of the problem, discuss application scenarios, compare different algorithms for solving the problem, and empirically evaluate the algorithms by means of a set of substantial case studies.