Characterizing logging practices in open-source software

—Software logging is a conventional programming practice. While its efficacy is often important for users and developers to understand what have happened in the production run, yet software logging is often done in an arbitrary manner. So far, there have been little study for understanding logging practices in real world software. This paper makes the first attempt (to the best of our knowledge) to provide a quantitative characteristic study of the current log messages within four pieces of large open-source software. First, we quantitatively show that software logging is pervasive. By examining developers’ own modifications to the logging code in the revision history, we find that they often do not make the log messages right in their first attempts, and thus need to spend a significant amount of efforts to modify the log messages as after-thoughts. Our study further provides several interesting findings on where developers spend most of their efforts in modifying the log m...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Ding Yuan, Soyeon Park, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: Characteristic Study, Compiler Designers, Failure Diagnosis, ICSE 2012, Software Engineering