Towards Automated Configuration Documentation

Configurability is a common property of software allowing programs to be customized for the user. While configurability is pervasive, it can also lead to faults (or misconfigurations) and make program evolution challenging. Dependencies can be missed, essential code can be left in place when a configuration option is removed, or code can be deleted or changed when still in use by other configuration options. A key issue is a lack of sufficient documentation and traceability between configuration options and code during software evolution. Existing approaches to solve these problems include automated documentation, analysis of version control history, or the use of special program configuration management languages. However, none of these provide a sufficient solution managing configuration changes over time. In this paper we propose our vision for an automated approach called ConfiGen, which provides user-facing documentation along with a back-end analysis showing definitions and uses of configuration options along with traceability to lines of program code for evolution. We performed a case study demonstrating its potential usefulness.