ConfMapper: Automated Variable Finding for Configuration Items in Source Code

Abstract

Misconfigurations have become the major cause of software failures as a consequence of software development. Traditional methodology of misconfiguration diagnosis based on program analysis has distinct advantages in accuracy and efficiency. However, the state-of-the-art researches do the mapping between the configuration items and relevant program variables either manually locating or following specified annotation with fixed format, which requires enormous domain knowledge and heavy workload. In order to address the challenges, we manually studied eight popular open-source software and observed some mapping-related features. Based on these observations, we proposed a tool named ConfMapper to accomplish the automated mapping from the configuration items to the relevant program variables without understanding the complicated semantic context in source code. We carried out comprehensive experiments upon seven popular open-source software. ConfMapper could reach nearly 100% accuracy in mapping the configuration items to program variables, and mine about 91.5% potential configuration items in average.