ICO: A Platform for Optimizing Highly Configurable Systems

Dealing with large configuration spaces is a complex task for developers, especially when manually searching for the configuration that best suits both their functional and performance requirements. Indeed, a well-performing configuration may not fit developers' needs because of conflicting functional requirements, or vice-versa. In this paper, we propose ICO, a lightweight, domain-agnostic platform that supports multi-objective optimization for configurable software. The purpose of ICO is to provide the developer with the best-performing configuration by altering as little as possible the initial one, in order to remain as close as possible to the developer's functional requirements. We explain the foundations of ICO, describe its architecture, and explain how it can be used either through a command-line client or an Eclipse plugin. Finally, we assess ICO by evaluating its execution time and the time saved to users compared to a manual optimization.