Effective and scalable software compatibility testing
Ilchul Yoon, Alan Sussman, Atif M. Memon, Adam Porter · 2008
Today's software systems are typically composed of multiple components, each with different versions. Software compatibility testing is a quality assurance task aimed at ensuring that multi-component based systems build and/or execute correctly across all their versions' combinations, or configurations. Because there are complex and changing interdependencies between components and their versions, and because there are such a large number of configurations, it is generally infeasible to test all potential configurations. Consequently, in practice, compatibility testing examines only a handful of default or popular configurations to detect problems; as a result costly errors can and do escape to the field.