Modelling Execution Tracing Quality by Means of Type-1 Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

Execution tracing quality is a crucial characteristic which contributes to the overall software product quality though the present quality frameworks neglect this property. In the scope of this pilot study the authors introduce a process to create a model for describing execution tracing as a quality property; moreover, the performance of four different models created is compared. The process and the models presented are capable of capturing subjective uncertainty which is an intrinsic part of the quality measurement process. In addition, the possibility of linking the presented models to software product quality frameworks is also illustrated.

Software Product Quality Models, Developments, Trends, and Evaluation

“…Furthermore, the present study verified that the existing software product quality models do not adequately assess the quality of logging and execution tracing; however, it would be required for constructing a maintainability-analysability quality property [41,42]. The authors will endeavour to satisfy this demand in their future works by means of applying computational intelligence including fuzzy logic to represent abstraction, incomplete information, and conflicting quality properties.…”

“…Logging and execution tracing often used as synonyms play a key role in identifying software errors in multi-threaded, distributed, or embedded application, and have a denoting impact through that on the quality property maintainability [19,45,146]. Nevertheless, software product quality models offer serious improvement potential with regard to execution tracing quality as pointed out in [41,42]. The current research also contributes to this field by the thorough analysis of quality models introduced.…”

Quality Properties of Execution Tracing, an Empirical Study

“…The majority of the publications with regard to the problem they address can be classified in three groups: (1) where to insert log statements in the source code [13,20,[23][24][25][26][27][28], (2) what to log to provide sufficient information for failure analysis [13,17,27,29], and (3) how to log [13,19,27]. Tool support for selecting the appropriate places in the source code for inserting log statements consistently or for achieving optimal performance by the trade-off in the amount of information logged and the speed of execution usually involve more than one group mentioned above [13,17,[25][26][27][28][29].…”

“…Thus, execution tracing dumps data about the internal state changes and threads of execution in the application. Both logging and execution tracing require that the application be operational and be executed, through which they belong to the dynamic analysis techniques; moreover, they form integral part of the software maintenance [1][2][3].…”

“…The quality of logging, including whether log entries stem from the key places in the application code, has a drastic impact on the time spent on error analysis [4]. The popular integrated development environments and debuggers do not offer adequate solution in case (1) performance issues need to be analysed in deployment, (2) errors in real-time, embedded systems need to be localised, where the reproduction can cause serious damages or injuries, (3) the issues are concurrency-related or (4) the systems are distributed and actions have to be matched in each application part [4][5][6][7][8]. In addition, the mechanism of execution tracing can be localized in separate modules and does not need to be tightly coupled to the application code [6,[9][10][11].…”