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ESEC/FSE 2022
Mon 14 - Fri 18 November 2022 Singapore
Wed 16 Nov 2022 14:15 - 14:30 at SRC LT 51 - Dependability Chair(s): Tao Yue

Feature flags are a popular method to control functionality in released code. They enable rapid development and deployment, but can also quickly accumulate technical debt. Complex interactions between feature flags can go unnoticed, especially if interdependent flags are located far apart in the code, and these unknown dependencies could become a source of serious bugs. Testing all possible combinations of feature flags is infeasible in large systems like Microsoft Office, which has about 12000 active flags. The goal of our research is to aid product teams in improving system reliability by providing an approach to automatically discover feature flag interdependencies. We use probabilistic reasoning to infer causal relationships from feature flag query logs. Our approach is language-agnostic, scales easily to large heterogeneous codebases, and is robust against noise such as code drift or imperfect log data. We evaluated our approach on real-world query logs from Microsoft Office and are able to achieve over 90% precision while recalling non-trivial indirect feature flag relationships across different source files. We also investigated re-occurring patterns of relationships and describe applications for targeted testing, determining deployment velocity, error mitigation, and diagnostics.

Wed 16 Nov

Displayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change

14:00 - 15:30
DependabilityIndustry Paper / Research Papers at SRC LT 51
Chair(s): Tao Yue Simula Research Laboratory
14:00
15m
Talk
Unite: An Adapter for Transforming Analysis Tools to Web Services via OSLC
Industry Paper
Ondřej Vašíček Brno University of Technology; Honeywell International, Jan Fiedor Brno University of Technology; Honeywell International, Tomáš Kratochvíla Honeywell International, Bohuslav Křena Brno University of Technology, Aleš Smrčka Brno University of Technology, Tomáš Vojnar Brno University of Technology
DOI
14:15
15m
Talk
Discovering Feature Flag Interdependencies in Microsoft Office
Industry Paper
Michael Schröder TU Wien, Katja Kevic Microsoft, Dan Gopstein Microsoft, Brendan Murphy Microsoft, Jennifer Beckmann Microsoft
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
14:30
15m
Talk
Demystifying the Underground Ecosystem of Account Registration Bots
Research Papers
Yuhao Gao University of Technology Sydney; Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Guoai Xu Harbin Institute of Technology; Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Li Li Monash University, Xiapu Luo Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Chenyu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Yulei Sui University of New South Wales
DOI
14:45
15m
Research paper
Quantitative Relational Modelling with QAlloy
Research Papers
Pedro Silva University of Minho; INESC TEC, Jose Nuno Oliveira University of Minho; INESC TEC, Nuno Macedo University of Porto; INESC TEC, Alcino Cunha University of Minho; INESC TEC
DOI Pre-print
15:00
15m
Talk
Using Graph Neural Networks for Program Termination
Research Papers
Yoav Alon University of Bristol, Cristina David University of Bristol
DOI