Papers › Rethinking Software Misconfigurations in the Real World: An Empirical Study and...
Rethinking Software Misconfigurations in the Real World: An Empirical Study and Literature Analysis
Yuhao Liu, Yingnan Zhou, Hanfeng Zhang, Zhiwei Chang, Sihan Xu, Yan Jia, Wei Wang, Juncheng Hu, Zheli Liu
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Software misconfiguration has consistently been a major reason for software failures. Over the past two decades, much work has been done to detect and diagnose software misconfigurations. However, there is still a gap between real-world misconfigurations and the literature. It is desirable to investigate whether existing taxonomy and tools are applicable for real-world misconfigurations in modern software. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on 772 real-world misconfiguration issues, based on which we propose a novel classification of the root causes of software misconfigurations, i.e., constraint violation, resource unavailability, component integration error, and configuration semantic misinterpretation. Then, we systematically review the literature on misconfiguration troubleshooting to study the trends of research and the practicality of the tools and datasets in this field. We find that the research targets have changed from system and infrastructure software to advanced applications (e.g., cloud service). Meanwhile, research on non-crash misconfigurations has also grown significantly. Despite the progress, a majority of studies lack reproducibility due to the unavailable tools and evaluation datasets. In total, only eleven tools and four datasets are publicly available. We analyze the trends of existing literature on misconfiguration troubleshooting, summarize the challenges that users are faced with, and highlight the suggestions to mitigate and diagnose software misconfigurations. We release the real-world dataset of misconfiguration issues for follow-up research.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections