Understanding the Similarity of Log Revision Behaviors in Open Source Software
Xu Niu · International Journal of Performability Engineering · 2018
As logging code evolves with bug fixes and feature updates, developers may miss some log revisions due to a lack of general specifications and attention from developers.This makes it more troublesome to achieve good logging practices.In this paper, we try to study log revision behaviors from evolutionary history.Motivated by similar edits of clone codes, we assume there also exist similar log revisions that implicated log revision behaviors.Based on this assumption, we study the similarity of log revision behaviors and answer six research questions.Specifically, we find that 54.14% of log revisions belong to groups of similar log revisions and 64.4% of groups contain log revisions that are missed by developers.We stress the importance of branch statements on learning from similar log revisions since 53.51% of sampled similar log revisions are related to the semantics of branch statements.