Are They All Good? Studying Practitioners' Expectations on the Readability of Log Messages
Zhenhao Li, An Ran Chen, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Tse-Hsun Chen, Weiyi Shang

TL;DR
This study investigates practitioners' expectations on log message readability, identifies key aspects influencing readability, and demonstrates that machine learning models can effectively classify log message quality to improve logging practices.
Contribution
It provides new insights into readability standards for log messages, introduces practical guidelines, and explores automated classification using machine learning.
Findings
38.1% of log messages have inadequate readability
Deep learning models achieve over 80% accuracy in classification
Practitioners value structure, information, and wording in log messages
Abstract
Developers write logging statements to generate logs that provide run-time information for various tasks. The readability of log messages in the logging statements (i.e., the descriptive text) is rather crucial to the value of the generated logs. Immature log messages may slow down or even obstruct the process of log analysis. Despite the importance of log messages, there is still a lack of standards on what constitutes good readability in log messages and how to write them. In this paper, we conduct a series of interviews with 17 industrial practitioners to investigate their expectations on the readability of log messages. Through the interviews, we derive three aspects related to the readability of log messages, including Structure, Information, and Wording, along with several specific practices to improve each aspect. We validate our findings through a series of online questionnaire…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware System Performance and Reliability
