Configuration Testing: Testing Configuration Values as Code and with Code

Understand

This paper proposes configuration testing--evaluating configuration values (to be deployed) by exercising the code that uses the values and assessing the corresponding program behavior.

• We advocate that configuration values should be systematically tested like software code and that configuration testing should be a key reliability engineering practice for preventing misconfigurations from production deployment.
• The essential advantage of configuration testing is to put the configuration values (to be deployed) in the context of the target software program under test.
• In this way, the dynamic effects of configuration values and the impact of configuration changes can be observed during testing.