CTForge: Automatically Generating Test Suites for Software Configuration

Authors:
Open Access
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Software configuration plays a critical role in modern software systems, yet it also frequently leads to severe failures. Existing approaches, whether static analysis or LLM-based validation, struggle to capture implicit semantic constraints and validate configuration-code interactions. Leveraging existing unit tests is also insufficient due to their lack of configuration-specific focus. Thus, we present CTForge, an LLM-powered framework that automatically generates configuration-specific test suites. Its core innovation is a three-stage configuration-aware optimization pipeline that moves beyond vanilla test generation, specifically using parameter semantics to improve LLM outputs. This optimization pipeline iteratively aligns tests through: (1)enhance configuration-related code coverage to ensure relevance, (2) assertion validation across valid parameter values to eliminate false assertions, and (3) configuration-sensitivity verification to select tests that semantically exercise the intended configuration behavior. Evaluated on five large-scale systems, CTForge detects 63 out of 79 real-world configuration issues and achieves an F1-score of 0.88 in misconfiguration detection. CTForge also uncovers six previously unknown defects. Our work demonstrates that structured configuration-aware refinement is essential for LLM to produce effective test suites.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62532008)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (U2441238)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62502528)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62272473)

This publication has 68 references indexed in Scilit: