On the Temporal Relations between Logging and Code

Prior work shows that misleading logging texts (i.e., the textual descriptions in logging statements) can be counterproductive for developers during their use of logs. One of the most important types of information provided by logs is the temporal information of the recorded system behavior. For example, a logging text may use a perfective aspect to describe a fact that an important system event has finished. Although prior work has performed extensive studies on automated logging suggestions, few of these studies investigate the temporal relations between logging and code. In this work, we make the first attempt to comprehensively study the temporal relations between logging and its corresponding source code. In particular, we focus on two types of temporal relations: (1) logical temporal relations, which can be inferred from the execution order between the logging statement and the corresponding source code; and (2) semantic temporal relations, which can be inferred based on the semantic meaning of the logging text. We first perform qualitative analyses to study these two types of logging-code temporal relations and the inconsistency between them. As a result, we derive rules to detect these two types of temporal relations and their inconsistencies. Based on these rules, we propose a tool named TempoLo to automatically detect the issues of temporal inconsistencies between logging and code. Through an evaluation of four projects, we find that TempoLo can effectively detect temporal inconsistencies with a small number of false positives. To gather developers' feedback on whether such inconsistencies are worth fixing, we report 15 detected instances from these projects to developers. 13 instances from three projects are confirmed and fixed, while two instances of the remaining project are pending at the time of this writing. Our work lays the foundation for describing temporal relations between logging and code and demonstrates the potential for a deeper understanding of the relationship between logging and code.