Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Configuration Allocation in Pre-Production Testing
This work addresses the challenge of dynamic configuration allocation in pre-production testing for software reliability, offering a novel approach that advances beyond traditional methods.
The paper tackles the problem of allocating limited testing resources across evolving configurations with drifting failure probabilities by introducing a reinforcement learning framework, which consistently outperforms static and optimization-based baselines and approaches oracle performance in simulations.
Ensuring reliability in modern software systems requires rigorous pre-production testing across highly heterogeneous and evolving environments. Because exhaustive evaluation is infeasible, practitioners must decide how to allocate limited testing resources across configurations where failure probabilities may drift over time. Existing combinatorial optimization approaches are static, ad hoc, and poorly suited to such non-stationary settings. We introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that recasts configuration allocation as a sequential decision-making problem. Our method is the first to integrate Q-learning with a hybrid reward design that fuses simulated outcomes and real-time feedback, enabling both sample efficiency and robustness. In addition, we develop an adaptive online-offline training scheme that allows the agent to quickly track abrupt probability shifts while maintaining long-run stability. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms static and optimization-based baselines, approaching oracle performance. This work establishes RL as a powerful new paradigm for adaptive configuration allocation, advancing beyond traditional methods and offering broad applicability to dynamic testing and resource scheduling domains.