Search for: All records

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. 

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. 

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. 

Log analysis is a technique of deriving knowledge from log files containing records of events in a computer system. A common application of log analysis is to derive critical information about a system's security issues and intrusions, which subsequently leads to being able to identify and potentially stop intruders attacking the system. However, many systems produce a high volume of log data with high frequency, posing serious challenges in analysis. This paper contributes with a systematic literature review and discusses current trends, advancements, and future directions in log security analysis within the past decade. We summarized current research strategies with respect to technology approaches from 34 current publications. We identified limitations that poses challenges to future research and opened discussion on issues towards logging mechanism in the software systems. Findings of this study are relevant for software systems as well as software parts of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. 

In modern computing, log files provide a wealth of information regarding the past of a system, including the system failures and security breaches that cost companies and developers a fortune in both time and money. While this information can be used to attempt to recover from a problem, such an approach merely mitigates the damage that has already been done. Detecting problems, however, is not the only information that can be gathered from log files. It is common knowledge that segments of log files, if analyzed correctly, can yield a good idea of what the system is likely going to do next in real-time, allowing a system to take corrective action before any negative actions occur. In this paper, the authors put forth a systematic map of this field of log prediction, screening several hundred papers and finally narrowing down the field to approximately 30 relevant papers. These papers, when broken down, give a good idea of the state of the art, methodologies employed, and future challenges that still must be overcome. Findings and conclusions of this study can be applied to a variety of software systems and components, including classical software systems, as well as software parts of control, or the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. 

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.