A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Configuration Sampling Problem

Configurable software systems have become increasingly popular as they enable customized software variants. The main challenge in dealing with configuration problems is that the number of possible configurations grows exponentially as the number of features increases. Therefore, algorithms for testing customized software have to deal with the challenge of tractably finding potentially faulty configurations given exponentially large configurations. To overcome this problem, prior works focused on sampling strategies to significantly reduce the number of generated configurations, guaranteeing a high t-wise coverage. In this work, we address the configuration sampling problem by proposing a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based sampler that efficiently finds the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, allowing for the efficient identification of a minimal subset of configurations that covers all t-wise feature interactions while minimizing redundancy. We also present the CS-Gym, an environment for the configuration sampling. We benchmark our results against heuristic-based sampling methods on eight different feature models of software product lines and show that our method outperforms all sampling methods in terms of sample size. Our findings indicate that the achieved improvement has major implications for cost reduction, as the reduction in sample size results in fewer configurations that need to be tested.