From description to prescription: Unraveling log severity adjustments in open-source software

IF 4.1 2区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Journal of Systems and Software Pub Date : 2025-09-24 DOI:10.1016/j.jss.2025.112643

Eduardo Mendes , Marcelo Vasconcellos , Fabio Petrillo , Sylvain Hallé

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Context:

Logs are vital to understanding a software system’s behavior, often being the only evidence available to investigate failures.

Problem:

Selecting a Log Severity Level (LSL) can be challenging for the following reasons: (i) the absence of knowledge about how logs are used in production, (ii) the lack of understanding of how critical an event is, and (iii) the lack of practical guidelines. This leads to frequent LSL adjustments during software development and evolution.

Objective:

Our goal is to investigate the LSL adjustments between system releases and explore methods to improve LSL classification.

Methods:

We analyzed the log statements from different releases of open-source systems, focusing on their LSL adjustments and examining the commit comments to understand the reasons for the adjustments.

Results:

Our results show that most adjustments occur at the intersection of development and production environment logs. Furthermore, the main guiding factors for the adjustments are the experience and logging theory. Our contributions are (i) a description of trends and patterns in LSL adjustments and (ii) a set of 24 heuristics to guide the choice, review, and adjustments of LSL. We advise developers to adhere to the LSL purposes, routinely review LSL settings, and remain adaptable to their mutability.

查看原文本刊更多论文

从描述到处方：揭示开源软件中的日志严重性调整

上下文：日志对于理解软件系统的行为是至关重要的，通常是调查故障的唯一可用证据。问题：由于以下原因，选择日志严重性级别（LSL）可能具有挑战性：(i)缺乏关于如何在生产中使用日志的知识，（ii）缺乏对事件的关键程度的理解，以及（iii）缺乏实用的指导方针。这导致在软件开发和发展期间频繁的LSL调整。目的：研究不同系统版本间LSL的调整情况，探讨改进LSL分类的方法。方法：我们分析了来自不同版本的开源系统的日志语句，重点关注它们的LSL调整，并检查提交注释以了解调整的原因。结果：我们的结果表明，大多数调整发生在开发和生产环境日志的交叉点。经验和测井理论是进行调整的主要指导因素。我们的贡献是(i)对LSL调整的趋势和模式的描述，以及（ii）一套24种启发式方法来指导LSL的选择、审查和调整。我们建议开发人员坚持LSL的目的，定期检查LSL设置，并保持对其可变性的适应性。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Systems and Software 工程技术-计算机：理论方法

CiteScore

8.60

自引率

5.70%

发文量

193

审稿时长

16 weeks

期刊介绍： The Journal of Systems and Software publishes papers covering all aspects of software engineering and related hardware-software-systems issues. All articles should include a validation of the idea presented, e.g. through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: •Methods and tools for, and empirical studies on, software requirements, design, architecture, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution •Agile, model-driven, service-oriented, open source and global software development •Approaches for mobile, multiprocessing, real-time, distributed, cloud-based, dependable and virtualized systems •Human factors and management concerns of software development •Data management and big data issues of software systems •Metrics and evaluation, data mining of software development resources •Business and economic aspects of software development processes The journal welcomes state-of-the-art surveys and reports of practical experience for all of these topics.