Where do developers log? An empirical study on logging practices in industry

Qiang Fu, Jieming Zhu, Wenlu Hu, Jian Guang Lou, Rui Ding, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang, Tao Xie

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

System logs are widely used in various tasks of software system management. It is crucial to avoid logging too little or too much. To achieve so, developers need to make informed decisions on where to log and what to log in their logging practices during development. However, there exists no work on studying such logging practices in industry or helping developers make informed decisions. To fill this significant gap, in this paper, we systematically study the logging practices of developers in industry, with focus on where developers log. We obtain six valuable findings by conducting source code analysis on two large industrial systems (2.5M and 10.4M LOC, respectively) at Microsoft. We further validate these findings via a questionnaire survey with 54 experienced developers in Microsoft. In addition, our study demonstrates the high accuracy of up to 90% F-Score in predicting where to log.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE Companion 2014 - Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages24-33
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9781450327688
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2014 - Hyderabad, India
Duration: May 31 2014Jun 7 2014

Publication series

Name36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE Companion 2014 - Proceedings

Other

Other36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2014
Country/TerritoryIndia
CityHyderabad
Period5/31/146/7/14

Keywords

  • Automatic logging
  • Developer survey
  • Logging practice

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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