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A Case Study on the Evolution of Configuration Options of a Highly-Configurable Software System

Evolving configurable software poses unique challenges, due to dependencies between the configuration knowledge and the assets that implement the system. Despite a lot of research in the area of configurable software evolution many open challenges subsist, which hamper industrial adoption of different techniques. For instance, there is not much research on the co-evolution of tests and the configuration space. A challenge for this is that the configuration space is often not clearly defined and reasoning over its evolutions and the implication from it is difficult. In this paper, we study the configuration space of the web-based bug tracker Bugzilla, a highly configurable system, replicating the analysis of previous research. In addition, we analyze the evolution of the configuration space over several versions of the system to investigate the changes that were made over the revisions spanning the development of several years and their implications and open challenges.