Questions about CDL dependencies in eCos

  Hi everyone,

I am a researcher at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. As 
part of a research team with members from both the University of 
Waterloo and Carnegie Mellon University, USA, we are interested in 
creating automated tools for large configurable software. We are 
currently working on automatically reverse engineering configuration 
dependencies  from code such that all dependencies between configuration 
features are documented (similar to those documented in CDL files). This 
is useful to automatically identify dependencies that need to be 
enforced in the configuration files. These tools can also help with 
consistency checks between the code and the dependencies specified in 
configuration files (such as CDL files). We have tested our 
infrastructure on four different open-source systems, including eCos, 
and can already recover many of the existing dependencies [1]. We are 
now doing a qualitative investigation of dependencies from the 
perspective of developers. We want to understand the sources of such 
configuration dependencies as well as the general reasons why developers 
enforce dependencies in practice.

To improve our tools, and to better understand the configuration 
dependencies  enforced, we are interested in talking to developers who 
are familiar with CDL dependencies and/or who use the configuration 
features during coding (e.g., through #ifdef macro). This can take place 
through an online questionnaire and/or phone/Skype interviews. Either of 
these would take 15 min of your time. We would discuss when you enforce 
dependencies in CDL, your usage of #ifdefs in the code, as well as 
concrete examples of dependencies we could not automatically recover.

If you are willing to participate, please fill in the questionnaire 
found at http://bit.ly/1mjy326 and/or reply to this email to set up an 
interview time.


Thanks,

Sarah Nadi
University of Waterloo, ON, Canada
[email protected]
http://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~snadi

[1] Sarah Nadi, Thorsten Berger, Christian Kästner, Krzysztof Czarnecki. 
Mining Configuration Constraints: Static Analyses and Empirical Results. 
In ICSE'14: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software 
Engineering, Hyderabad, India, 2014.

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