White-box approaches for improved testing and analysis of configurable software systems

There is a significant conceptual gap between the source code of a configurable system and the runtime behaviors of its individual configurations. In the source, configurations are woven together into a conceptually unified program. At runtime, however, they are largely treated as independent executables. This gap leads to static analyses that, by acting on the source representing the entire configurable system, yield imprecise results with respect to individual executables. Testing, in contrast, acts on individual executables without leveraging the configurable codebase per se. In this paper, we sketch a research path that seeks to narrow the configuration source-runtime gap, based on the observation that most configurations share significant amounts of source-level structure (hence ldquowhite-boxrdquo) with other, related, configurations. We seek to identify and exploit this structure to reduce analysis and testing effort by sharing analysis and test results among related configurations.