When to Sample from Feature Diagrams?

Uniform random sampling (URS) has many applications in configurable systems analysis.Usually, feature models consisting of a hierarchical feature diagram and additional side constraints specify the space of valid configurations to be sampled from.However, URS has predominately been applied on feature models translated a priori into conjunctive normal form (CNF).In this work, we study URS approaches that instead operate directly on feature diagrams and provide a comparative evaluation of their performance against well-established URS tools for CNF representations.Our findings suggest that translating feature models to CNF offers advantages, even in the presence of only few side constraints. CCS Concepts Software and its engineering Software product lines.