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Debugging and error resolution has become increasingly time-consuming and difficult for all domains of software development. Error logs have become very important when it comes to debugging and error resolution. To remedy the problems presented in the logs, typically, a search on online forums would shed light on the solution. We present a novel approach to utilizing these logs in conjunction with external Question and Answer forums to compute and expedite resolution by suggesting a solution to runtime errors. Since log format is non-standard and use cases can vary widely, our architecture allows for extreme customization for the intended ecosystem as well as a great degree of fine-tuning. We evaluated our solution in a case study and made our implementation open-source for the community. 

Poor design choices, bad coding practices, or the need to produce software quickly can stand behind technical debt. Unfortunately, manually identifying and managing technical debt gets more difficult as the software matures. Recent research offers various techniques to automate the process of detecting and managing technical debt to address these challenges. This manuscript presents a mapping study of the many aspects of technical debt that have been discovered in this field of study. This includes looking at the various forms of technical debt, as well as detection methods, the financial implications, and mitigation strategies. The findings and outcomes of this study are applicable to a wide range of software development life-cycle decisions. 

Program slicing is a common technique to help reconstruct the path of execution a program has taken. It is beneficial for assisting developers in debugging their programs, but its usefulness depends on the slice accuracy that can be achieved, which is limited by the sources of information used in building the slice. In this paper, we demonstrate that two sources of information, namely program logs, and stack traces, previously used in isolation to build program slices, can be combined to build a program slicer capable of handling more scenarios than either method individually. We also demonstrate a sample application of our proposed slicing approach by showing how our slicer can deduce integer inputs that will recreate the detected error’s execution path. 

Microservice architecture has become the leading design for cloud-native systems. The highly decentralized approach to software development consists of relatively independent services, which provides benefits such as faster deployment cycles, better scalability, and good separation of concerns among services. With this new architecture, one can naturally expect a broad range of advancements and simplifications over legacy systems. However, microservice system design remains challenging, as it is still difficult for engineers to understand the system module boundaries. Thus, understanding and explaining the microservice systems might not be as easy as initially thought. This study aims to classify recently published approaches and techniques to analyze microservice systems. It also looks at the evolutionary perspective of such systems and their analysis. Furthermore, the identified approaches target various challenges and goals, which this study analyzed. Thus, it provides the reader with a roadmap to the discipline, tools, techniques, and open challenges for future work. It provides a guide towards choices when aiming for analyzing cloud-native systems. The results indicate five analytical approaches commonly used in the literature, possibly in combination, towards problems classified into seven categories. 

Constraint consistency errors in distributed systems can lead to fatal consequences when left unobserved and undetected. The primary goal of quality engineers should be to avoid system inconsistencies in general. However, it is typically a much more straight forward process in monolith-like systems with one codebase than in distributed solutions where heterogeneity occurs across modules. In this paper, we raise the research question of what is the existing state-of-the-art and research literature practice when it comes to consistency checking in distributed systems. We conducted a systematic search for existing work and assess the evidence to categorize the approaches and to identify used techniques. Identified works offer interesting directions and achievements. Often the works share tool prototypes and instruments to build on the top of when performing further research in this direction and we share them in this paper. Finally, we discuss open challenges and gaps in this field to promote the interest of the research audience. 

Logging is a vital part of the software development process. Developers use program logging to monitor program execution and identify errors and anomalies. These errors may also cause uncaught exceptions and generate stack traces that help identify the point of error. Both of these sources contain information that can be matched to points in the source code, but manual log analysis is challenging for large systems that create large volumes of logs and have large codebases. In this paper, we contribute a systematic mapping study to determine the state-of-the-art tools and methods used to perform automatic log analysis and stack trace analysis and match the extracted information back to the program's source code. We analyzed 16 publications that address this issue, summarizing their strategies and goals, and we identified open research directions from this body of work.