Distributed systems pose unique challenges for software developers. Understanding the system’s communication topology and reasoning about concurrent activities of system hosts can be difficult. The standard approach, analyzing system logs, can be a tedious and complex process that involves reconstructing a system log from multiple hosts’ logs, reconciling timestamps among hosts with non-synchronized clocks, and understanding what took place during the execution encoded by the log. This paper presents a novel approach for tackling three tasks frequently performed during analysis of distributed system executions: (1) understanding the relative ordering of events, (2) searching for specific patterns of interaction between hosts, and (3) identifying structural similarities and differences between pairs of executions. Our approach consists of XVector, which instruments distributed systems to capture partial ordering information that encodes the happens-before relation between events, and ShiViz, which processes the resulting logs and presents distributed system executions as interactive time-space diagrams. Two user studies with a total of 109 students and a case study with 2 developers showed that our method was effective, helping participants answer statistically significantly more system-comprehension questions correctly, with a very large effect size.
Wed 8 JulDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
01:05 - 02:05 | P12-Testing and DebuggingJournal First / Software Engineering in Practice at Silla Chair(s): Taeksu Kim Samsung Research, Samsung Electronics | ||
01:05 12mTalk | Debugging Crashes using Continuous Contrast Set MiningSEIP Software Engineering in Practice Rebecca Qian Facebook, Inc., Yang Yu Purdue University, Wonhee Park Facebook, Inc., Vijayaraghavan Murali Facebook, Inc., Stephen J Fink Facebook, Satish Chandra Facebook | ||
01:17 12mTalk | Automatic Abnormal Log Detection by Analyzing Log History for Providing Debugging InsightSEIP Software Engineering in Practice Jinhan Kim , Valeriy Savchenko Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS, Kihyuck Shin Samsung Electronics, Konstantin Sorokin Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS, Hyunseok Jeon Samsung Electronics, Georgiy Pankratenko Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS, Sergey Markov Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS, Chul-Joo Kim Samsung Electronics | ||
01:29 8mTalk | Explaining Regressions via Alignment Slicing and MendingJ1 Journal First Haijun Wang Ant Financial Services Group, China; CSSE, Shenzhen University, China, Yun Lin National University of Singapore, Zijiang Yang Western Michigan University, Jun Sun Singapore Management University, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Jin Song Dong National University of Singapore, Qinghua Zheng Xi'an Jiaotong University, Ting Liu Xi'an Jiaotong University | ||
01:37 8mTalk | Historical Spectrum based Fault LocalizationJ1 Journal First Ming Wen Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, Junjie Chen Tianjin University, China, Yongqiang TIAN The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Rongxin Wu Department of Cyber Space Security, Xiamen University, Dan Hao Peking University, Shi Han Microsoft Research Asia, Shing-Chi Cheung Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology | ||
01:45 8mTalk | Visualizing distributed system executionsJ1 Journal First Ivan Beschastnikh Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Perry Liu University of British Columbia, Albert Xing University of British Columbia, Patty Wang University of British Columbia, Yuriy Brun University of Massachusetts Amherst, Michael D. Ernst University of Washington, USA DOI Pre-print | ||
01:53 8mTalk | An Integration Test Order Strategy to Consider Control CouplingJ1 Journal First Shujuan Jiang China University of Mining and Technology, Miao ZHANG City University of Hong Kong, Yanmei ZHANG China University of Mining and Technology, Rongcun Wang China University of Mining and Technology, Qiao YU Jiangsu Normal University, Jacky Keung City University of Hong Kong | ||