一句话：通过分析10个Java和7个C#项目，系统刻画日志语句中自然语言描述的用法，并公开数据集。
日志在现代软件开发与维护中至关重要，但日志语句中的描述文本如何设计缺乏严格指南，描述不当会拖慢甚至误导事后分析等维护任务。为弥补这一空白，本文系统研究开发者究竟记录了什么，重点考察日志语句中自然语言描述的使用。作者对10个Java项目和7个C#项目进行源代码分析，共覆盖28,532,975行代码和115,159条日志语句，得到6项有价值发现。研究还表明，使用简单信息检索方法即可自动生成日志描述文本，BLEU-4最高49.04、ROUGE-L最高62.1，并公开数据集以促进后续研究。
Logging is a common programming practice of great importance in modern software development, because software logs have been widely used in various software maintenance tasks. To provide high-quality logs, developers need to design the description text in logging statements carefully. Inappropriate descriptions will slow down or even mislead the maintenance process, such as postmortem analysis. However, there is currently a lack of rigorous guide and specifications on developer logging behaviors, which makes the construction of description text in logging statements a challenging problem. To fill this significant gap, in this paper, we systematically study what developers log, with focus on the usage of natural language descriptions in logging statements. We obtain 6 valuable findings by conducting source code analysis on 10 Java projects and 7 C# projects, which contain 28,532,975 LOC and 115,159 logging statements in total. Furthermore, our study demonstrates the potential of automated description text generation for logging statements by obtaining up to 49.04 BLEU-4 score and 62.1 ROUGE-L score using a simple information retrieval method. To facilitate future research in this field, the datasets have been publicly released.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot4744,
title = {Characterizing the natural language descriptions in software logging statements},
author = {Pinjia He and Zhuangbin Chen and Shilin He and Michael R. Lyu},
booktitle = {ASE},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.1145/3238147.3238193}
}