Prioritizing component compatibility tests via user preferences

Many software systems rely on third-party components during their build process. Because the components are constantly evolving, quality assurance demands that developers perform compatibility testing to ensure that their software systems build correctly over all deployable combinations of component versions, also called configurations. However, large software systems can have many configurations, and compatibility testing is often time and resource constrained. We present a prioritization mechanism that enhances compatibility testing by examining the ldquomost importantrdquo configurations first, while distributing the work over a cluster of computers. We evaluate our new approach on two large scientific middleware systems and examine tradeoffs between the new prioritization approach and a previously developed lowest-cost-configuration-first approach.