Failure studies are important in revealing the root causes, behaviors, and life cycle of defects in software systems. These studies either focus on understanding the characteristics of defects in specific classes of systems, or the characteristics of a specific type of defect in the systems it manifests in. Failure studies have influenced various software engineering research directions, especially in the area of software evolution, defect detection, and program repair.
In this paper, we reflect on the conduct of failure studies in software engineering. We reviewed a sample of 52 failure study papers. We identified several recurring problems in these studies, some of which hinder the ability of software engineering community to trust or replicate the results. Based on our findings, we suggest future research directions, including identifying and analyzing failure causal chains, standardizing the conduct of failure studies, and tool support for faster defect analysis.
Tue 15 NovDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
14:00 - 15:30 | Debugging/localizationResearch Papers / Industry Paper / Demonstrations / Ideas, Visions and Reflections at SRC LT 51 Chair(s): Mauro Pezze USI Lugano; Schaffhausen Institute of Technology | ||
14:00 15mTalk | Metadata-Based Retrieval for Resolution Recommendation in AIOps Industry Paper DOI | ||
14:15 15mTalk | PaReco: Patched Clones and Missed Patches among the Divergent Variants of a Software Family Research Papers Poedjadevie Kadjel Ramkisoen University of Antwerp; Flanders Make, John Businge University of Antwerp; Flanders Make; University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Brent van Bladel University of Antwerp; Flanders Make, Alexandre Decan University of Mons; F.R.S.-FNRS, Serge Demeyer University of Antwerp; Flanders Make, Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Foutse Khomh Polytechnique Montréal DOI | ||
14:30 15mTalk | Fault Localization to Detect Co-change Fixing Locations Research Papers Yi Li New Jersey Institute of Technology, Shaohua Wang New Jersey Institute of Technology, Tien N. Nguyen University of Texas at Dallas DOI | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Reflections on Software Failure Analysis Ideas, Visions and Reflections Paschal Amusuo Purdue University, Aishwarya Sharma Purdue University, Siddharth R. Rao Purdue University, Abbey Vincent Purdue University, James C. Davis Purdue University DOI | ||
15:00 7mTalk | eGEN: An Energy-saving Modeling Language and Code Generator for Location-sensing of Mobile Apps Demonstrations Kowndinya Boyalakuntla Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Marimuthu Chinnakali National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Sridhar Chimalakonda IIT Tirupati, K. Chandrasekaran National Institute of Technology Karnataka | ||
15:08 7mTalk | SFLKit: A Workbench for Statistical Fault Localization Demonstrations Marius Smytzek CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Andreas Zeller CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security Pre-print | ||