Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Which Variables Should I Log?, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers usually depend on inserting logging statements into the source code to collect system runtime information. Such logged information is valuable for software maintenance. A logging statement usually prints one or more variables to record vital system status. However, due to the lack of rigorous logging guidance and the requirement of domain-specific knowledge, it is not easy for developers to make proper decisions about which variables to log. To address this need, in this work, we propose an approach to recommend logging variables for developers during development by learning from existing logging statements. Different from other prediction tasks in software …