Received: Added at production Revised: Added at production Accepted: Added at production DOI: xxx/xxxx An Exploratory Semantic Analysis of Logging Questions Harshit Gujral*1 | Sangeeta Lal2 | Heng Li3 1Department of Computer Science Engineering and Information Abstract Technology, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India. Logging is an integral part of software development. Software practitioners often face issues Email:
[email protected] in software logging, and they post these issues on Q&A websites to take suggestions from 2Lecture Data Science, School of Computing and Mathematics, Keele the experts. In this study, we perform a three-level empirical analysis of logging questions University, Keele, United Kingdom. posted on six popular technical Q&A websites, namely Stack Overflow (SO), Serverfault Email:
[email protected] 3Department of Computer and Software (SF), Superuser (SU), Database Administrators (DB), Software Engineering (SE), and Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal, Android Enthusiasts (AE). The findings show that logging issues are prevalent across var- Montréal, Canada. Email:
[email protected] ious domains, e.g., database, networks, and mobile computing, and software practitioners from different domains face different logging issues. The semantic analysis of logging ques- Correspondence *Corresponding author. tions using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) reveals trends of several existing and new logging topics, such as logging conversion pattern, android device logging, and database logging. In addition, we observe specific logging topics for each website: DB (Log shipping, Log file growing/shrinking), SU (Event Log, Syslog configuration), SF (Log analysis, Sys- log configuration), AE (App Install, Usage tracking), SE (Client server logging, Exception logging), and SO (Log file creation/deletion, Android Emulator Logging, Logger class of log4j).