Scalable Product Line Configuration: A Straw to Break the Camel's Back

Software product lines are hard to configure. Techniques that work for medium sized product lines fail for much larger product lines such as the Linux kernel with 6000+ features. This paper presents simple heuristics that help the Indicator-Based Evolutionary Algorithm (IBEA) in finding sound and optimum configurations of very large variability models in the presence of competing objectives. We employ a combination of static and evolutionary learning of model structure, in addition to utilizing a pre-computed solution used as a "seed" in the midst of a randomly-generated initial population. The seed solution works like a single straw that is enough to break the camel's back -given that it is a feature-rich seed. We show promising results where we can find 30 sound solutions for configuring upward of 6000 features within 30 minutes.