Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2027

Abstract

Developers write logging statements to monitor software runtime behaviors and system state. However, poorly constructed or misleading log messages can inadvertently obfuscate actual program execution patterns, thereby impeding effective software maintenance. Existing research on analyzing issues within logging statements is limited, primarily focusing on detecting a singular type of defect and relying on manual intervention for fixes rather than automated solutions.To address the limitation, we initiate a systematic study that pinpoints four specific types of defects in logging statements (i.e., statement code inconsistency, static dynamic inconsistency, temporal relation inconsistency, and readability issues) through the analysis of real-world log-centric changes. We then propose LogUpdater, a two-stage framework for automatically detecting and updating logging statements for these specific defects. In the offline stage, LogUpdater constructs a similarity-based classifier on a set of synthetic defective logging statements to identify specific defect types. During the online testing phase, this classifier first evaluates logging statements in a given code snippet to determine the necessity and type of improvements required. Then, LogUpdater constructs type-aware prompts from historical logging update changes for an LLM-based recommendation framework to suggest updates addressing these specific defects.We evaluate the effectiveness of LogUpdater on a dataset containing real-world logging changes, a synthetic dataset, and a new real-world project dataset. The results indicate that our approach is highly effective in detecting logging defects, achieving an F1 score of 0.625. Additionally, it exhibits significant improvements in suggesting precise static text and dynamic variables, with enhancements of 48.12% and 24.90%, respectively. Furthermore, LogUpdater achieves a 61.49% success rate in recommending correct updates on new real-world projects. We reported 40 problematic logging statements and their fixes to GitHub via pull requests, resulting in 25 changes confirmed and merged across 11 different projects.

Keywords

Logging Statement, Logging Practice, Large Language Model

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Volume

35

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

31

ISSN

1049-331X

Identifier

10.1145/3731754

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3731754

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